Subject: Farms to School Project
Author: rlr29@idt.net
Date: 7/19/98 3:13 PM

Hi,
My name is Becky Ross. I teach 3rd grade in Benicia, California. I'm writing to ask if you might be willing to post the following project on your website or if you might have some suggestions for further contacts to find farms willing to participate.

Each year our school has a school-wide theme, and we build many of our activities around that theme.

Our theme for the 1998-99 school year is going to be (no formal name yet, but perhaps Old MacHenderson's Farm) farm related. We will have 3 components: farms and farm-life, the land and what helps things grow, and environmental; recycling, etc.

We would like to do a project with our third graders based on a popular internet and snail mail activity called The Flat Stanley Project, coordinated by Dale Hubert of Canada (http://www.enoreo.on.ca/flatstanley/index.htm).

This project is based on the children's book, Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown. Flat Stanley was a little boy who was flattened when a bulletin board fell on him. He wanted to visit his friends in California, but it was too expensive to go by train or plane. So, since he was so flat, his family mailed him.

What we would like to do is to find farms or ranches around the world who would be willing to host our version of Flat Stanleys for a period of 2 weeks or so. This would mean that one of our children would create a paper likeness of themselves, fold it up and send it by postal mail to the participating farms.

A letter from the student, information about our town and a journal for the paper student to keep daily entries of their experiences at the farm will be included. Someone at the participating farm would then make daily entries in the journal for the paper student where he or she would record information about the daily routine,other activities, thoughts, etc. that the student has at that farm. When finished, the farm family would then mail the student, the journal and any souvenirs that the student collected back to our school. We will display all of the returns for our Open House.

We would like to begin this project in October by having our children do their part and send off their flat paper dolls to the farms who have decided to participate. As we are hoping to include farms from around the globe, we realize that we need to make a distant deadline so that each farm can choose the most appropriate season for their focus on the journal writing and sharing their very busy and valuable time with this project. We would hope to have all of our students and their journals back by the end of February.

If you are willing to have a student assigned to "visit" you and fill in the included journal, please send a confirming email to Becky Ross, rlr29@idt.net. Include your name, mailing address and type of farm.Then, as the project nears, we will send you more information.

Please feel free to pass this note on to a neighbor or friend who you think might also be interested in the project. We are hoping to have 120 farms or ranches from across the globe.

We have created a website to introduce the project to the internet. The site can be found at http://www.benicia.k12.ca.us/henderson/fawproject.htm. As the time nears, we will include updates at this website.

We sincerely hope that you will consider joining us in the endeavor. We feel that linking cultures, lifestyles and communication can help build a stronger more productive world for all of us.

Sincerely,
Becky Ross

Grade 3
Henderson Elementary School
650 Hastings Dr.
Benicia, CA 94510
http://www.benicia.k12.ca.us/henderson
rlr29@idt.net
rossr@busd.benicia.k12.ca.us

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