Hubert invited other teachers to take part by 'hosting' Flat Stanley visitors in their classrooms as they arrived in the mail, and encouraging students to keep their own Flat Stanley journals. Hubert had the brilliant idea of having children create their own Flat Stanley paper cutouts and mailing them to friends and family around the globe, in order to foster authentic literacy activities and make children write about Stanley's adventures. In 1994, Dale Hubert initiated the Flat Stanley Project in Ontario, Canada starting from Jeff Brown’s book Flat Stanley.

The activities involved in letter and travel journal writing create a sense of belonging, of caring about the pen pal’s feelings, of bonding with the others. Writing letters and travel journals becomes an interesting task for the students due to the entire process of writing about things that are of interest to our students while taking photos and drawing pictures to make the letters more vivid. Flat Stanley becomes the messenger between two different cultures bridging the cultural gap.

The Flat Stanley Project is an excellent example of what teachers can do to trigger young minds to think and write creatively. In project work students work as a team and the outcome of their work is a concrete product such as a travel journal, report, or diary. Project work involves multi-skill activities focusing on a topic of interest. Good language skills are required and the content of the project itself is of utmost importance. It brings not only personal involvement on the students’ part, but also decision-making on how they will do it. Project work exposes students to authentic language and authentic tasks, becoming learner-centered. Interest in project work and its integration into the teaching foreign language process have been increasingly growing among students and teachers alike. Contacting schools in other countries prompts writing and exchanging letters to pen pals, which gives an insight into children’ s lives, encouraging excellent social skills. The activities triggered by this project have led to bridging distant cultural gaps with students oversea.

Teachers and students who have embarked upon it are competent, enthusiastic, and committed to exploring new techniques of broadening their English book horizons creating a more communicative learning environment.

Flat stanley grading rubric