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=Lets Start at the very beginning ....= ="Hollow with an echo, the brand new smell of the renovated classroom."= = Our Cardboard Community Learning Journey = =Written by the Year 5 & 6 children in Discovery Room = During the holidays our classroom was renovated, we have new carpet, new benchtops, lino to the cloakbay, furry walls, new cupboards and a repaint. It is dark blue like the night sky, with a light greyish brown paint and a feature of maroon on the front of the cupboards. So, when we arrived back this year our class was completely different, AND it had no furniture. It ALSO had taped lines all over the floor. We wondered what it meant. Some of us thought the tape was roads and the big area was a carpark. First we thought the taped bits were where we had to put all the new furniture BUT we were wrong !!! The taped areas were actually sections. The big area became our local park and there was one section for each of us - we were going to have to build our cardboard houses on it...We were going to have to build a COMMUNITY. Below is the slide show (in Prezi) that our teachers have shared to show what happened that term in our Classroom. It's about our awesome Inquiry into the importance of a supportive community. media type="custom" key="9348362" = The Building﻿ Work  =

We started work. We made letterboxes out of cardboard to receive and send our mail. MrHaddock dressed up as Mr Letterman and delivered all of our mail. We all got different amounts of money in our letterboxes and we had anauction to purchase our sections. The highest price was $790,000 and the cheapest was $50,000. We got official forms to apply for a Building permit,saying if you wanted any extra doors or windows foryour houses you would need to send it to Mr Haddock. It had to be approved before you could start to build. We had to put in a Tender slip with an amount of money that we wanted to pay for a cardboard box from Shad’s Builders Yard. We used a rubric to guide us when we were building our houses in the sections. It gave us advice and guidelines of what we needed to do. Four of us had to be evacuated from our properties because of a fault line through all of our sections. It caused us to become angry and quite distressed. (While all this was going on, our classroom still needed fixing up by the real builders, painters and carpetlayers. They had to come back and fix up the mistakes they had made during the renovation.)

When we were nearly finished building we decided we needed more information about “what a community really is” so we all went into Morrinsville on Our Big Day Out. We visited the College Pool, the Library and the Police Station to interview a variety of people and ask what their definition of a community was: We wanted to know what they did, and how they did their job to help the community. That was just the start… =Our PREZI-tation=