Unplugged Project - Flat

I'll bet I'm not the only Mama to come up with a Flat Stanley project for this week's Unplugged Project theme! But I might win an award for the most prep time...I got a little obsessed.

I had heard of Flat Stanley before, but a quick web search gave me more information than I could even process! The original book published in 1964 is a short story about a kid who gets flattened by a falling bulletin board...it's not all bad, though. He can do fun things like slide under the door and get himself mailed around the world. Some very fun people came up with the idea of encouraging kids to make their own Flat Stanleys and mailing them around the world to promote literacy and friendship. We didn't have time to mail him around the world, but we did make our own Stanley from the template found here. I printed him, colored him, and (knowing my daughter) laminated him...then the fun began.

I introduced Stanley to E while she was doing a craft project, and she was mildly interested. She looked him over, got him involved in the craft, and it seemed to be going well. Then I thought we could pose him around the house and yard, and I would take pictures. That worked up to a point, but E seemed more interested in crumpling him up than setting him out for a photo shoot. We worked through it, and I knew she had warmed up to him when she turned to me and said, "Mama? Tell Flat Stanley I'm pooping."

After I had some good pics of Stanley, I showed them to E and asked her what he was doing in each one. She liked looking at the pics on my computer, but didn't seem to want to tell a story. She made a few comments which I wrote down, and then I used them to create a little book about Flat Stanley's visit. This was where the time involved got WAY out of control. Microsoft Word hates me. It always has...and so when I tried to do a "book fold" page layout, I could actually hear Bill Gates laughing. I could not get it to print right, and I REFUSED to just print it in pieces and cut and paste manually. For goodness sakes, if "book fold" doesn't work, then why is it an option, I ask you!?

In the end, I compromised. Turns out there's a bug in my program that many a user has tried to combat unsuccessfully. So I printed the book on half sheets of card stock and glued them together into a heavy (though not toddler proof!) book. This morning, Daddy read the book to E and she pretended to be interested. Note to self: Do not try to read E a book after a long conversation about candy. When Daddy got to the last page, E said, "More! I want more pum-rockas!" "What do you want, honey?" asked Daddy. "Pop Rocks," I answered. "She wants more Pop Rocks." Turns out that the adventures of a flat, laminated boy cannot compete with strawberry flavored, carbonated sugar.