Young city planners create their ideal cities – Fenton Tri County Times

TRI-COUNTY TIMES | HANNAH BALL

Second-grade students at Linden Elementary created Mini Michigan, which is their interpretation of how a city should be built. They used boxes, construction paper, glue and other craft materials to build the police station, the school, and other structures.

TRI-COUNTY TIMES | HANNAH BALL

TRI-COUNTY TIMES | HANNAH BALL

TRI-COUNTY TIMES | HANNAH BALL

TRI-COUNTY TIMES | HANNAH BALL

TRI-COUNTY TIMES | HANNAH BALL

Posted: Tuesday, May 23, 2017 5:24 pm

Young city planners create their ideal cities Tri-County Times | Fenton, MI Hannah Ball Staff Reporter Tri-County Times |

Linden If it were up to second-graders at Linden Elementary, their city would have a college called Unicorn University and Hyatt Elementary would have a huge water park.

The youngest city planners unveiled their box city projects Thursday, May 11 at Linden Elementary, where they showed off their ideas to Linden City Councilor and Planning Commission member Ray Culbert and City Manager Paul Zelenak. Each school made its own city, which was laid out on the gym floor.

Second-grade teachers Sarah Mawhinney and Elizabeth Clarke organized the event and worked with the kids.

Building this city truly is a fun project that helps children get a sense of what kind of characteristics go into a community. They needed to understand the basic parts of a community before planning to build their own city, Mawhinney said. Going through the democratic voting process to select the city name, as well as selecting plots of land to build on were very intentional activities to simulate real communities. This is an important and pretty creative activity to help guide our second-grade Social Studies curriculum in Linden.

Hyatt students named their city Eagle City and Linden Elementary students chose the name Mini Michigan.

Linden city officials talked with the children and told them what usually goes into a city, like residential areas, government buildings, stores, parks, churches, and other buildings. From there, the kids used boxes, construction paper, glue, tape and other craft materials to construct their buildings to create a city.

They designed hospitals, hardware stores, water parks, and other structures with their imaginations.

Culbert said it went wonderful this year. I think the thing that amazes me is how smart the children are. They seem to know right away what belongs in a city and thats great... I had one kid that said, You know what our city really needs is WiFi. He said thats the most important thing.

Posted in News for Fenton, Linden, Holly MI on Tuesday, May 23, 2017 5:24 pm.

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Young city planners create their ideal cities - Fenton Tri County Times