Te Rakau

As part of Cultural Week and our music programme, we have been learning Maori Stick Games.  Te Rakau helps us to learn beat, Te Reo and to cooperate with our friends.  It also helps our coordination.  Most importantly it is fun and we LOVE it!

Cultural Week Visual Art

During Cultural Week we learnt a lot about the Maori gods that are part of the creation story.  We used these outlines to practice drawing a koru shape.  We will fill the backgrounds and dye them.  Come back next week and see the final results of these and our printmaking koru shapes.

We've also been practicing our collaboration by working on these with one or two buddies.  It is awesome to watch the children working together and using their words to express their feelings and ideas about their learning together.

Gardening Discovery

We are working hard to remove the weeds in the butterfly garden.  We use our time during Discovery Time to help the butterflies.  We learnt lots about working together, persevering, using our manners, and sharing the tools.  A great start was made on the weed issue.  You should have seen the size of some of the roots we were trying to pull out!  It was a little bit like the Enormous Turnip story when we all tried to work together to pull it out.  

Heather and Tom were our Discovery Time Stars this week for showing creativity in their activities.

Making an old Christchurch Street

When we went to the museum we enjoyed looking around the old Christchurch Street.  We have been working on a timeline from when the Maori people came in their waka until today so we thought we would try and make the street.

Last week we painted boxes - brown, white and red.  Brown for the wood, white for painted wood and red for the bricks.

Today it was time to work in groups collaboratively to decide on windows and doors.  Once we had decided that together we cut out our windows and stuck them on.  We had to give reasons why we had put windows where we had.

It was great to see all the groups working together and including others.  Miss Browne was super proud of us and could hear children saying "Thank you", "Can I please have the scissors", "We can all have a job", "You can have a turn now".

Our buildings need doors now and then we can put a street and put all our buildings along the street.

Compassion

We found a butterfly that wasn't very happy so we made it some sugar syrup to help give it some energy.  We used sugar and hot water and we tried to feed it from our fingers.  The butterfly didn't know what to do so we put the bowl of sugar syrup outside and took the butterfly to the garden.  We hope it enjoyed its special drink.

Being Collaborative at Discovery

At Discovery Time we are making some vertical gardens from old drink bottles.  We have to use a hammer and a nail to make holes in the bottles.  It is a bit tricky but when we collaborate with a friend, it makes the job easier and we both feel proud of what we have made.  We are looking forward to growing parsley, chives and basil in our gardens and being able to use these in our Discovery Time cafe.

 Destiny and Riley G were our Discovery Time Stars this week.  Great collaborating on the gardens and in the Outside space.

Discovery Time - Collaboration

Check out Anastasia and Isabel being collaborative when performing their puppet show in Discovery Time today! What great teamwork!

Investigations

This morning we completed our trees and bushes to make our own Riccarton Bush, just like the settlers would have seen when they arrived in Christchurch.  

We also began to make a whare and Dean's Cottage to represent the types of houses that people used to live in.  We used the photos from our trip to help us look at the different types of houses and what they had.  

All these things will be going up on our walls to make a timeline of events that happened in our past.  It is great to see the collaboration and discussions happening between our students as they make these items.  

They are also thinking hard.  Some people wanted to come to New Zealand in the waka because they were good at paddling and others wanted to coming in the big sailing ships, like The Endeavour, because they wanted to have a bed to sleep in!  What great thinking and reasoning!