This week, Year 5 started doing a project called Micro societies. First, we learnt and talked all about scarcity. Scarcity is when you don't have enough of something for everyone who wants it to have it e.g. in some parts of the world there is not enough water or food for all the people

who need or want it. Next, we read a story called Justenuf about some people on a different planet. They have a special computer on their planet called Abun Dance that makes sure that there is just enough of everything for everybody. But...one day Abun Dance breaks down! The people on the planet then don't have enough of everything, and that creates problems and arguments. The story stopped there, and we had to decide what the people in the story should

do to make sure there's just enough for everyone.

After that, we played a game called the shape game. In this game, you split up into teams and

were given folders with items in them. The object of the game was to score points and to score points you had to use the items inside your folder to make 10cm circles and 10cm squares. In your folders you might also get counters and they earned you 5 points each. When we opened our folders, we started trading with other teams. For example ,we were one of the only

groups that had paper in our folder so we traded paper for rulers and compasses, which we didn't have. At the end of the shape game,we found out that our teams represented countries.

The teams that had all the advanced stuff, (like all the measuring equipment) were representing

1st world countries. These were countries that had all sorts of stuff that many other countries didn't have, but were lacking the simple products. This is where 3rd world countries (like our team) come in. They don't have much advanced,fancy stuff,but they do have simple items they can trade with other countries.

To end Micro societies for this week, we came up with our class/society's name and each designed a flag for it that we'll all vote on next week. Each table group chose a name and then the whole class voted on which name they liked best.The names consisted of:

Cocozenia

Brightland

Wakatania (Guess which class we are!)

Wakatanian Republic

The Tribe

In the end, Brightland won.