Alara's Letter to John Key

Dear Mr John Key, I am Alara and I am emailing you here from Rolleston in Christchurch on behalf of my classroom at Rolleston Primary School. About a month after the Feburary earthquake our classroom wanted to do our part to help Christchurch. This was when our journey started. Our learning system was called Reggio. This is when we chose a Subtopic that we where interested in. Our classrooms main topic was Natural Disasters. Some of us chose to study the Pacific Ring of fire. Others were interested in the Japan disaster. Some people did a project on predicting earthquakes and the plates under the ground. But the biggest group was the Christchurch group. Some of the group wanted to research the damage of christchurch and some of us wanted to do the rebuild. We did one school term of research and then we had to start deciding what our project was going to be. When it came to that, the Damage of Christchurch group had major troubles; how do you make something that resolves and fixes the damage of Christchurch? They thought and thought and thought and in the end the Rebuild group and the Damaged Christchurch group would join together to both make a BRAND NEW Cathedral for our city! With the knowledge of the Damaged Cathedral group and the Rebuild Cathedral group we could possibly make the best model cathedral in all of New Zealand. Some of our best pieces of research were that wood and steel were the best remedy for building a strong structure. On the very last week of term we would get a wriggle on; We started to make a Cardboard cathedral. Our base was about a 2.3 x 2.3 square piece of cardboard. We made walls for it and we had very daintily stuck them onto the base but that was when disaster struck. Somebody leant and fell back on one of the walls we hadn't fully secured yet. Then we thought, How are we going to get this out of this classroom? Since our journey was still young and our model Cathedral was still reasonably small we thought we could still get it out of the class room. We thought wrong. We got the Cathedral totally squished and thats when we took a step back from our creation and we decided to get some parent help as our teacher, Mrs Stewart couldn't help us and the other projects all at the same time. One of the children in our class offered to see if their Father could come in to help out and give us a little bit of advice. Mr Tikey took the offer up before you could say "We can do it!". Once he came everybody started working harder than ever! With his help we had to make the biggest decision ever; Are we going to get rid of the Cardboard cathedral? The reason we had to do this was; 1) Mr Tikey had bought some ULTRA strong polystyrene that we didn't know what to do with and that would be perfect to build a whole cathedral with. 2) Once we had carried the massive cathedral through the door it had been squashed so badly that we couldn't fix it. We all had a major descusion and in the end some said that if we were going to spend all year making this we had better make it good. Others said this is what makes us come to school every day and we want it to be the best creation we have ever made and maybe one of the last creations we will ever make in 2011. With that we pulled down the cathedral and had our minds set on a new cathedral that people will come from miles around to see. We slotted the pieces of polystyrene and got to work. Now, thats all we want to tell you. The reason my classroom, 8B7, is emailing you today is because we want to ask you a big favor. On Monday the 5th of December 2011 we are having a major assembly to reveal Our Great Grand Cathedral. We have so far invited the Dean Peter Beck, Christchurch press to do a story on it, 3 News to report, TVNZ to report, Bob Parker and a few other people that provided us with a few things along the way. Another reason for coming to our Great Grand reveal for our Cathedral would be that you can hear the rest of the story and look at a Cathedral that our whole school thinks is one of the most amazing things that you could ever imagine from 26 Year 6 pupils. We hope you could consider this A.S.A.P. If you could contact us us on topdecklearners@gmail.com Yours sincerly, Alara

The Heart of the Matter - Reggio Discussion

Lochlan started the discussion by saying... "We shouldn't have a broken heart, cause it's a new cathedral."
The conversation continued...
Oscar: Hearts were broken because of the earthquake but now they are
not cause the cathedral is new. What if you missed the words?
Travis: the broken one will make people sad.
Laura: I think its fine, maybe we could change the words to we did fix
this.
Zane: I don’t know why we need a heart.
Alara: We would put something along the lines of kia kaha let’s build our new city together. I saw that in the
red zone.
Zane: What will we do then cause we have fixed the thing.
Laura: I don’t think its fair on Natasha. She spent ages on the broken heart.
Molly: We can keep the broken heart & have a picture of the old cathedral above it.
Josh: With the broken heart we are stuck in the past.
Molly: Don’t you want to remember though?
Josh: Yes cause its been there for years.
Travis & Conner: Its life move on...
Josh: we could have a full heart.
Oscar: maybe on one wall we could have one broken heart and the old cathedral but then on the other wall we
could have a full heart
Natasha: Put the whole one on the wall rather than painting another one.
Emily: You could have one half full and one half crushed.
Zane: you could put it around the rose window.
Oscar: that would look weird
Alara: Emily’s idea is good but you don’t want to forget the past.
Josh: But we are not talking about the earthquake it’s about the cathedral.
Oscar: We need to say kia kaha because we don’t know what we will go through in the future.
Zane: maybe we should start now!
Oscar: Maybe we should draw up idea’s on the board and put names under the idea’s we want and have a vote.
6 children go to the whiteboard and get started.

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