Friday with Ms Gain: The Flat Stanley Project

In Room 2 today we had a lovely surprise when we received our first letter about a Flat Stanley adventure. Most of us have only just sent our Flat Stanleys away this week but Eliza had made a Flat Stanley at home all by herself and posted it to her grandparents in the United States of America a few weeks ago! The letter from her grandparents came all the way from Wyoming, one of the states in America. They sent us a letter full of interesting information and photos about this state and the state capital city Cheyenne.

We learnt about and saw photos of:

• Cowboys lassoing animals in rodeos,
• Indians dressed up in traditional costumes and dancing in a parade,
• Festivals with pancake breakfasts,
• Oil refineries (where they process oil)
• Railway trains (Cheyenne was originally a railroad town, and still is)
• The golden Capitol Dome (of the capital city building)
• Snowy Range Mountain, and
• Lake Marie (which Eliza visited when she was 3 years old).

Wyoming - One of the 50 States in America

A Cowboy in a Rodeo


Lake Marie and the Snowy Mountains


We then did some investigating about the United States of America. We learnt that this country is made up of 50 states (each state is like its own little country). We all found the state of Wyoming on our own maps of the United States of America using atlases and google maps on the data projector to help us. Some of us in Room 2 had heard of President Obama, the president of the United States of America. Lots of us were also curious to find out about what kinds of animals lived in the North American continent. We visited a fantastic website from an American Zoo (Smithsonian Zoo), where we looked at a photo gallery of animals in North America including:

• Bald eagles,
• Mexican wolves,
• Flamingos,
• Beavers,
• Otters,
• Gila Monsters (poisonous lizards),
• American Alligators, and
• Hummingbirds

The photo gallery has lots of information and photos of animals in the different continents, which we will explore in class as we learn more about the different countries and continents. You can visit this website at home by clicking on the link ‘Smithsonian Zoo’ under ‘The Flat Stanley Project’ on the right hand side of this blog page.