TTA: Flat Stanley and Lottery

This week's TTA is to write about your latest reads. I haven't done TTA for awhile, but I have a few minutes tonight and as you all know I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE to read. So this TTA appealed to me. So I thought I would share two.

The first one is Flat Stanley. I just read this to my class at school. It is a clever little book about a boy who has a bulletin board fall on him. He isn't hurt but he is flattened. So he has several adventures while flat. Including being mailed to California in an envelope to go on a vacation with his friend. My class really enjoyed this book. Now we are doing a Flat Stanley project. Each child has drawn a Flat Stanley. Now they are writing a letter about what happened to him and how he wants to travel around the world and have some adventures. We will mail their Flat Stanleys to various people around the country/world and ask them to send a postcard back telling briefly what Stanley does there. My class is very excited. We will post these postcards on a bulletin board with a map and track where he goes. It will help them learn letter writing as well as a little about geography and different places.

If any of my friends out there in other locales would be interested in participating, let me know. I'd love to send a Flat Stanley off to you. All you have to do is send a postcard back. Also, for my several friends that homeschool, this might be a fun project for you to do with your kids. There is even an official Flat Stanley Project that you can participate in. I'm not doing the official one, but it looks cool too.

For myself, the book I finished most recently was Lottery. It is about a man who is slow. He wins the lottery and his selfish extended family wants his money. They are trying to figure out how to take it from him. While he is slow intellectually, he is wise in many ways. He knows what is really important. And he becomes partner in a business and has many great ideas that help the business become more successful. There are some really touching moments. Small warning: There is profanity in this book. The main character's best friend swears a lot and the main character tells you about his swearing. Yet because of the way it is written, in the rambling mind of someone who is slow, the swearing didn't seem as offensive as it usually would.

Right now I am reading an autobiography for my book club. It is called German Boy by Wolfgang W.E. Samuel. I'm only about 50 pages in, but I like his writing style. I think I will really enjoy this book.