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

Hearts for Christchurch

Hearts for Christchurch.

I love the new fresh feeling of children singing and dancing to my choir and organs. Sing songing to the squeals of laughter, prayers of happiness and my world back to the way it used to be but only better this time.

I was crumbling, all lonely and weeping to the ghostly sounds of the fading city all around me. The lights of hope slowly fight their way through to become part of what Christchurch used to be. I was sneezing the dust of my broken city that must and would be fixed.

The earthquake alarmed me, hearing the curdling cries of death and panic and the clouds of dust invading my worried city.

My eyes were blinded by the unbelievable loss of my soul mates, friends and family. It was bringing me down. I could be restored but there would always be a lonely ache in my heart for the loss that can never be replaced.

Already, the ground beneath me feels stronger. I thought my tradesmen would take longer to do their necessary repairs- but no- just like you and I, they felt the time was right to restore our city’s heart.

A regular school team

In a school there are a number of people who help run the school easily with no glitches along the way.

At school there are many people who help so here are a few and one of which is a principal Mr Morall. Mr Morall is nearly and almost the heart of the school. He is the one who does the news letters, arranging guests to come to the school and he is the one you go to if you get in really big trouble!

Another person is Mrs Tucker who is a Financial Controller and she is the one who is in charge of all the money and some of the notices.

Mr Treeweak is in charge of many many jobs so we have to heartfully respect him. He is the caretaker, the rugby coach, and a main role of a school.

The teachers and the children are the ones who bring it all to life. The teachers have all this knowledge stored up in their brains ready to teach the children.

A whole bunch of people are the ones that make a miracle school and miracle people live life to the full extent.

Tekon-tustle-toor

Today while I was slowly nevertheless carefully creeping up the steep rock about two metres away from the top of Jelly mountain, something pounced at me and all these thoughts suddenly rushed through my brainy head and, honestly, I thought I was going to die! the creature slowly eased away from me as I eased away from him, terrified. Meanwhile the strange mammal was smiling at me from ear to ear and thats when I realised it was not smiling at me, it was smiling at Maria's dairy which I happened to be holding at the time.

It must have thought I knew Maria because it suddenly did the strangest thing.I held out the diary thus it was in the creature's reach and it took the book by its mouth, put it on the ground, later that moment it came and amusingly fell asleep on my lap.

Thats when I realised the mammal was a Tekon-tustle-toor!The creature was not fierce,it was as calm a an enraged fish!
Therefore when you go to Jelly mountain,DO NOT kill, treasure, these endagered species. What exeptional animals we have got!

Alara