Can Flat Stanley Spend A Day With You?

Cross-Cultural Living

Let’s have a little bit of fun today.  A good Twitter friend,  FJ who tweets @customersmatter, asked me for some help in spreading the word about his Flat Stanley project.  Now I came to Europe before the Flat Stanley Project, but I have had Flat Stanley visit a couple of times in the last few years.

But I realized that everyone else around me here in France did not know Flat Stanley.  So here is a little explanation.

Flat Stanley is the title character of a children’s book written by Jeff Brown in 1964. In this story, Stanley gets flattened and uses this as an advantage to travel around.

In French Flat Stanley is known as “Clément Aplati“

In 1995 a schoolteacher in Canada, Dale Hubert, started the Flat Stanley Project to help his students learn to write letters. Children drew pictures of Flat Stanley and mailed them to different places.  Recipients were to return Flat Stanley after writing something to tell about Flat Stanley’s travels, often with photos or postcards.  Schools in North America continue this practice today with some variations.

With FJ’s Flat Stanley project, for students in a 2^nd grade class in San Jose, California, you are asked to:

• Print out the picture of Flat Stanley, or have a child copy and color in a new one
• Take a photo of Flat Stanley – ideally showing something of where you live
• Email the photo back to jack.cuen@gmail.com by April 17th with your name, location and what Flat Stanley is up to

So if you have children or want to have a little fun, participate in showing Flat Stanley a part of your world.  Think about what photo you can take of him that show a little bit about what you do and what your life is like.  Then keep in touch with FJ’s blog to find out at all the places Flat Stanley has gone.

As you can imagine, this is a good exercise to create cross-cultural awareness of other countries.  I am looking forward to seeing how many different countries FJ’s Flat Stanley travels to and what he gets up to during his travels.

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Read more on Cross-Cultural Living:

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• Can Flat Stanley Spend A Day With You?
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• Cultural Differences Even In Washing Dishes
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• Differences In Copywriting Job Titles In French
• Different Names In The World
• Don’t Confuse Sales Method With Your Product Or Service
• Example Of Cultural Differences In Italian Politics
• Foreign Film Festival
• It’s All About The Offer – Let’s Refuel America!
• Living In A Multicultural America
• Motivation To Travel?
• The Cross-Cultural Classroom
• Twestival 2009 Across The Globe

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