I’ve had this idea brewing for quite a while. I’ve heard of theFlat Stanley project. This is a project of community building that connects students with the world. The project connects classrooms with others, and student then track and write about their character’s “journey and adventures.”
The premise of the Flat Stanley project is below. You can read about Flat Stanley or get involved at this link: https://www.flatstanley.com/about
The basic principle of The Flat Stanley Project is to connect your child, student or classroom with other children or classrooms participating in the Project by sending out “flat” visitors, created by the children, through the mail (or digitally, with The Flat Stanley app). Kids then talk about, track, and write about their flat character’s journey and adventures.
I’d love to do something like this for my library. What brought this to life is my son’s current homework assignment. He is four. His daycare/preschool classroom is called the Pirates. They send home a parrot named Polly. Polly then travels with the student for a week. The family builds a notebook page of the parrot’s adventures. Polly has been quite a few fun places! My son has not let Polly out of his sight since Monday.
Today, Polly went with us to the Mall of America. She spent seven hours at Nickelodeon Universe, watching (or going) on rides! Polly’s adventures were captured in the gallery below. They will make great pictures for the daycare album.
So, my challenge is how to recreate this for my library. I’d love to invite families to take __something__ with them when they travel. Hopkins North is an internationally minded school. Imaging all the places the mascot could go!
My challenge: many of the students travel at the same time. How can I create something that can go with all of them over EM or winter break? Do I create and laminate an image to bring along? Will they have as much personality as Polly?
The second challenge is how to map the visits. I think the possibilities of Google forms to capture location data are amazing, but how do I connect the stories and pictures?
This is a wonderful challenge to figure out!
Have you done anything like Polly or Flat Stanley with your students? What was your process? And, what suggestions would you make to someone just starting out?