Flat Stanley

What a fun and relaxed week!  For co-op, we read the book Flat Stanley - the story of a boy whose bulletin board falls on him during the night and leaves him 1/2 inch thick.  He is able to do amazing things being that thin, like going down a grate to get his mom's ring, he was mailed to California to visit a friend, and helped the police nab some art thieves by pretending to be a painting on the wall at the art museum.

One of the activities we did in co-op was making flat people.  Here are pictures of the co-op flat people.

Each child is sending his/her flat person somewhere, along with a journal.  Flat Alex is travelling to Maryland, and Flat Nicolas is on his way to Georgia.  We are getting return flat people from those families to journal also.

We did a lapbook, but I have only taken pictures of a couple of the interesting components, because we will not be finished with the book until later.

The boys designed their own stamps - Alex's are at the top, and Nicolas's is below it.

After seeing the close relationship of Stanley and his brother in the book, we looked at my boys' brotherly relationship.  They wrote down some things in their own books about their brothers (Alex-top, Nicolas- bottom).

This morning, for breakfast, I surprised the boys with Flat Stanley pancakes - because in the book when Stanley's mom and dad saw him the morning the bulletin board fell, his mother said Stanley was flat, and his dad added "as a pancake."

This afternoon, to finish things off, we did a marshmallow experiment.  Both boys chose 3 heavy objects and guessed which one would flatten a marshmallow the most.  Alex chose a shoe, a rock and a 2 1/2 lb. weight - he predicted the rock.  Nicolas chose a dictionary, a rock and a 5 lb weight - he predicted the dictionary.  After flattening our marshmallows, we weighed each item.  Of course the heaviest object should flatten the marshmallow the most, however in Nicolas's case, the book flattened it the most (even though it only weighed 2 lbs.)  Hubby says it probably depended some on how the marshmallow was placed.  They had fun.