Have you read the book
Flat Stanley about the adventures of a boy who gets flattened by a notice board falling on him? Luckily, he's unharmed apart from being flattened like a pancake. This opens the way for new adventures, including being put in an envelope and posted to a friend's house for a holiday.
Well, flat travelling is inspired by this book. There's even an international
Flat Stanley Project where children all over the world can exchange flat characters with each other. There are even groups specifically for home educators -
Homeschool Flat Traveller Exchange and
Herron's Nest Flat Traveller Exchange.
The idea is that you make a flat character to send as a guest to another family. They, in turn, send you their flat traveller for you to host. Flat travellers are pictures of people, animals, cartoon characters that are laminated with your name and address on the back in case you lose it. We've had a few flat travellers over the years, some hand-drawn (Lucy the robin), some were magazine cut-outs (Dr Who) and the last one was a printout of a photo found online, Mr Quack the Duck.
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| Mr Quack the Duck |
Our flat travellers have been to various US states, Canada, Zimbabwe, Australia and England. We've received exciting packages containing small gifts, photo albums, books, sweets, receipts, travel tickets, photo CDs and the all-important journal. Sometimes this has been as short as a side of A4, sometimes as long as an exercise book. They have all been eagerly anticipated and gratefully received. We have learnt so much about different countries and have been privileged with small insights into other people's lives and home ed journeys.
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| Mementoes from our flat's travels |
Much as we have loved receiving our parcels, we have equally loved sending them. We've loved taking photos with our visiting flat travellers and choosing small gifts and souvenirs to send home with them. It has been fun collecting postcards and putting together journals to try and give another family a small insight into where we live and what we do.
Boykin has good memories of our flat travelling adventures, it's been about 5 years since our last one and he decided he wanted to do one more. He write to his penfriend and asked him to swap. Luckily, his penfriend had also done flat travellers before too, so they both knew what was involved 😊
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| Making Pengy McPengface feel at home |
I'm so glad that we had the opportunity to do a flat traveller just one more time. We took Pengy McPengface to different places, took photos, bought souvenirs, wrote (briefly) in the journal and sent him home again. It was fun to flat travel again, and exchanging with his penfriend was a special visit for our last flat traveller 😊
