James and Nicola's Whānau group (with Neil stepping in!) retold the tale of how Maui discovered fire. We did this through the medium of puppets!
First we got into groups and retold the legend. Then we got back together to share, before planning and discussing what we needed to make. We asked, how did we want to do it? What characters will we need? How will we make the settings for the scenes and the backing music?
Everybody played their part in creating the artwork for the show, as well as telling the story. Some were on stage during the performance and some recorded their voices. We also made the background music using GarageBand.
Today we started our Friday Whanau Groups. We will be spending 20 minutes in our Whanau Groups every two weeks, after assembly. This week we focussed on writing. We shared some writing with each other and asked each other questions about our writing. It is really great to work with buddies across the school!
It was a really special event in the last week of term as many of us met on the beach by moonlight. Thanks to John and Scott we had a blazing fire to warm our hands by.
We sang some beautiful waiata, thought about the importance of Matariki and remembering people in our family who can't be with us anymore and some of our seniors led our haka.
We had some time to roam the beach and take in the beauty of our surroundings, tapping into some gratitude for our very special place and our school whanau.
We then headed back to school for some shared kai and got to hear a talk from Dean and Xavier from Heritage NZ. They told us about the significance of our place and the harbour in relation to Kupe.
After the talk, we broke up into our whanau groups and had a day of Matariki related workshops which included waiata and dance, weaving fish as we listened to the story of the star fishes of Matariki with flax and paper, weaving stars with wool and paper plates, creating beautiful Matariki constellation pictures and making instruments and noise! The day was fantastic as we worked in Tuakana/Teina our whanau groups, with older children helping out younger ones. Our Matariki art is up all around the school. Come have a look and tell us what you think!
Today we worked in whanau groups and worked with different people across the school. We worked with different teachers too at different times of the day.
Nic and Shona Activities
We brainstormed the names of the stars and what each star is kaitiaki of. We were blown away by what the students already knew about the different stars.
We sang the Matariki song:
Nga Tamariki O Matariki
Waitī, Waitā, Waipunarangi,
Tupu-ā-nuku, Tupu-ā-rangi, Ururangi e
Koinei ngā tamariki o Matariki
(These are the children of Matariki)
Ngā whetū e pīataata i te rangi e
(The bright stars that shine in the sky)
Ngā whetū e pīataata i te rangi e
(The bright stars that shine in the sky)
We worked with buddies to weave stars. We used wool and paper plates. We knew it would be tricky so we discussed what Character Strengths we could use to overcome these challenges. Some of the ideas were judgement, perspective, kindness, bravery, perseverance and zest.
We watched the beautiful story of the Seven Stars of Matariki read by the author, Toni Rolleston-Cummins:
Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence Defined. Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman,the developers of the personal strengths classification, define the appreciation of beauty and goodness as “the ability to find, recognize, and take pleasure in the existence of goodness in the physical and social worlds.”
Today we had a focus on the character strength of Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence. We worked across the school in Whanau groups.
Kyla (Solly's mum) worked with students to make Maro for Matariki.
We took photos of things that we think are beautiful from around the school. We made these into a collage. You can see this next week at our Arts Celebration. Please make sure that you visit all of the spaces in the school to look at all of the wonderful learning that we have been doing.
We also created a piece of found material art inspired by Andy Goldsworthy. We also loved the opportunity to work with the artist Stan Chan.
