The adventures of Flat Stanley

My eight-year-old cousin Trevor wrote to me recently from Pleasant Gap, Pennsylvania, to ask for my help with a school project.

Dear Michael,
We are working on a Flat Stanley project. Stanley is a character in our book, Flat Stanley. He was flattened when a big bulletin board fell on him while he was in bed sleeping. In the book, his parents sent him in the mail to California. Please take Stanley on an adventure and take lots of pictures and don't forget to send him back! Have fun!
Trevor

Jeff Brown wrote this book in 1964, but Dale Hubert, a Canadian schoolteacher, turned it into a cultural phenomenon in 1995 when he had the idea of getting kids to draw their own Flat Stanleys and mail them to others. The Flat Stanley project has the aim of getting kids excited about reading and writing, as well as of making them curious about the world. It's really caught on: thousands of school classes across North America are doing this.

So, for Trevor and for Mrs. Krape and Miss Guth's second-grade class at Pleasant Gap Elementary School, this would be an opportunity to learn a few things about Munich. I enlisted three of my co-workers — Rita Forbes, our audio editor, who is from Missouri; Richard Mote from our youth magazine, Spot on, who is from Australia; and Petra Daniell, also from Spot on, who is from an exotic place called Gräfelfing.

The rest is for Trevor — but come along anyway. You might be interested to see what we did! I tried to focus on the things that are most different from what you'd see in rural Pennsylvania.

Click on any picture to make it bigger.