Flat Friends are on the Way!

This year my students and I have been reading different Flat Stanley books as a part of the Common Core Standard to compare themes, settings and plots from stories written by the same author about the same characters. Because we were having so much fun with it, we decided to mail out our own Flat Friends to different state and countries to learn more about them. The Flat Friends were mailed out today to 12 different states and 14 different countries some of which include Denmark, Lebanon, Ireland, New Zealand, England, Australia and more! The hosting families and schools will spend time with our Flat Friends and then mail us back some info and pictures. We are excited to hear about how much fun our Flat Friends have in these different places. We have created a wiki to track our friends and share our learning and photos.  You can visit that here – http://stanleysis.wikispaces.com/

Skype with our Flat Stanley Buddies in Romania

On Thursday, March 15th we were so happy to be able to speak live on Skype with the Bunnies.  They are in 3rd grade at the Mark Twain International School in Bucharest, Romania.  We have been sharing and learning about them for the last few months through our shared wiki and mailing packages of Flat Stanely’s.  We decided to each bring in something from home to share: hobbies, travels, sports, etc.  Skype was causing us some difficulties with audio problems and dropped calls but we made it through.  We are usually 7 hours difference in time but because the US changes to Daylight Savings Time 2 weeks before Romania, we were only 6 hours difference.  Special thanks to Mrs. Milos who was nice enough to keep the students after school for a hour to make this possible.  We were so very impressed with how well they speak English!  Check out these videos to see how much fun we had!

 

Stanely’s Return from New Zealand


We were so happy when our package of Flat Stanley’s returned from New Zealand! Because of a mix up, they were mailed a month or so late. So we received a package filled with belated Christmas cards and letters about what fun our Stanley’s had in New Zealand. It was interesting to hear about how they spend a summer time Christmas at the beach or a backyard barbecue, swimming and eating ice cream. While we are spending our winter time Christmas wearing sweaters and sitting by the fireplace drinking hot chocolate!

We received a few New Zealand Christmas ornaments – which included a flip flop – and handmade Christmas cards. The cards explained about an interesting tree called the Pohutukawa.

blog.travelpod.com

This tree has bright red flower heads from November to January and is sometimes called the New Zealand Christmas tree.