Visit from Hokitika Primary Bilingual class

Yesterday, we had a visit from the bilingual class from Hokitika Primary School. They had come up to Greymouth to do some rock climbing and had a spare hour to stop in and see us. We introduced ourselves and then sang some waiata, The Matariki Macarena and Taukaea Aroha (Ko te Whirika) and then went outside to play Crazy tag.

Singing a waiata

Playing Crazy tag

Matariki planting

This week we were lucky enough to have Whaea Eli come into school and work with some classes in the garden. The classes planted seeds and seedlings in our greenhouses and some children learnt how to cut the runners off the strawberry plants to replant them. Te Hiringa joined Mamaku 3 for their gardening. Whaea Eli also offered to run a gardening club at school too, lucky us!

Visit to the Whare Akoranga

Te Hiringa went for a visit to the Whare Akoranga at Greymouth High school on Monday. We went to look at th carvings on the front of the Whare Akoranga and listen to the story behind what each of the carvings meant. Whaea Catherine told us the story of how Aoraki and his brothers became the Southern Alps as they huddle on the back of their upturned waka. We also played games, sang waiata and did our mihi.

Whaea Catherine telling us about Tuterakiwhanoa and his toki

Listening to Whaea Catherine

Book Week 2019

Book week is one of Whaea Katie's favourite weeks of the year! We had a week filled with fun. We created our own door display of a book we had read, did buddy reading and had our book character assembly. We love seeing what the teachers dress up as and this year they came as crayons from the book 'The day the Crayons quit', which also happens to be one of our teacher's favourite books!

Buddy reading with Mamaku 3

Our book character outfits

Schoolkit

This year we participated in the Schoolkit - Get Writing Kit. It was great fun exploring the 13 items in the tin and creating anagrams and learning about sticky words. 

This is a photo of us after we opened the parcel we got from our buddy class at another school.

Firebricks

Check out this slideshow that we presented in Assembly. It could be something that you might like to have a go at. It is a great way to recycle paper!

Weeds, weeds everywhere!

When we returned back to school this year, we noticed that the kumara patch we planted last year had become overgrown with weeds. 

We went out one morning and pulled the weeds out so the kumara had a better chance to grow. Whaea Katie had to help us identify what a kumara plant looked like first to make sure we were pulling out the right things!

 Hard at work

 Before

After

Ko Te Hiringa Matou - We are Te Hiringa!

Here is a slideshow introducing...us...Te Hiringa! Read about us and see if you have anything in common with us. 
The seniors in the class have helped the juniors to complete a slide about themselves. 

Noho Marae - Mahitahi

On Wednesday 7th November our class went on our second noho for the year. This time we went to Mahitahi (Bruce Bay) to stay at Te Tauraka Waka a Maui marae. 

It was a 3 and a half hour drive and we stopped at Harihari domain to have morning tea and Fox Glacier school to have lunch, arriving at the marae about 1:30pm. 

We were welcomed by some of the whanau of the marae and had a kai with them afterwards. 

We spent most of our time there inside as it rained and then we were late back on Friday night as there was so much rain the roads between Bruce Bay and Hokitika were shut due to flooding and slips. 

We still had a lovely time though and we heard the stories of the wharenui and marae and got to see lots of beautiful carvings and tukutuku panels.

Technology Challenge - Build a Waka

We got given the challenge of creating a waka...out of newspaper.

We had to follow these rules...

1. Build the waka using only 5 whole newspapers and a roll of cellotape.
2. 3 people from the class have to fit in it (we worked out that Whaea didn't specifically say it had to be people in our group or be sitting down)

Here are some photos of our efforts

Arahura Marae visits

This month, August, our whole school has visited our local marae, Arahura Marae, just north of Hokitika. 

We have 360 students at our school so that was too many to go at once. We were split into 4 groups and the groups had both older students and younger students and some in the middle syndicates. This way we ended up with buddies, like a tuakana/teina system. It meant we had to help each other out.

We had about four practices per group going and our class, Te Hiringa, helped lead these. We had to teach the rest of the school about the powhiri process and what happens and why it happens.

We loved our trip there and listening to the stories about the marae. 

Poutini and Waitaiki

Nikau had a very busy day on today, not only was he our presenter for our 'Respecting our environment' video but he had been working with one of our new entrant classes, Rata 5, to teach them the legend of Poutini and Waitaiki.

He had learnt the local legend for his speechboard entry and Rata 5 had just been to visit the Arahura Marae so it all tied in nicely.

What a great display of manaakitanga from Nikau by sharing his knowledge with the new entrants!

Respecting Our Environment

Mrs O, our principal, put out a challenge to our classes to create a 1 minute video about respecting our environment. This is because at whanau time we have been talking about respect for ourselves, respect for others and respect for our environment.

We took two takes of our video, the first showing what shouldn't happen when the bell goes and the second showing what should happen...

Check it out!

Pixel Art

For maths we have been learning about area and square units. We combined maths and art to create our pixel art self-portraits.

Using square units we created a likeness of ourselves then used larger squares to create bigger artworks.

We also wrote in te reo Maori how many square it took to create each of our features.

Here are some of our artworks.

Kumara - Our Journey

Check out our Kumara journey, it started last year and we've just harvested them. 

Mistletoe Bay Camp

Some of the Te Hiringa tuakana (seniors) got to go on a second camp this term with Totara 1 class. It was in Mistletoe Bay in the Marlborough Sounds at the top of the South Island. 

It was a great camp with lots of outdoor activities. They got to try out new things and challenge themselves.

Check out our slideshow of photos.

Observational Drawing

This term we have been doing observational drawings. 

First we started off with some practice activities which made us look closely at the pictures we were given and then we had to redraw the pictures so they were as close as they could be to the original picture.

We thendid something much harder and did observational drawings of our shoes. Some of us did 2 or 3 pictures and we noticed new things each time to add to our picture.

We also drew our flowers that we had done an experiment on. We had been looking at how plants absorb water and put some white flowers in food colouring and after a couple of days we could see the petals changing the colour of the food colouring they were in.

Composting

As part of our Te Māra Kai ki te Tēpu (Garden to Table) unit we have looked at composting. It is a great way to give back to the garden so it can have nutrients to grow more food for us. What's even better is we had food scraps left over from our vege prepping we did for the kai cooker at the Family Fiesta last week so we used those!

Check out our photos!

Family Fiesta

Last Friday we had our annual Family Fiesta to raise funds for our school. Our class had two jobs we had to do to help out with it.

The first was performing in the Kapahaka group. We sang He Honore, Tiaho Mai Rā and did a haka which was a combination of Ruaumoko and Tahu Potiki.

Our second job was helping with the kai cooker (like a hangi). Our whanau came and prepped the veges for the kai cooker on the Thursday after school. On Friday morning we helped put the veges and meat in the trays.

First we put in the watercress on the bottom, then added a mixture of paukena (pumpkin), kumara, riwai (potato) and karoti (carrots) then spread the chicken drumsticks around on top. We carried the trays and stacked them in the kai cooker.
In the bottom of the kai cooker we had to put manuka wood chips to flavour the hangi. They had to be soaked overnight in water so they could create smoke and not burn.

Check out some photos of us!

Te Tiriti o Te Hiringa

We have been learning about the Treaty of Waitangi. We read a story about how Waitangi got its name, the story of Maikuku's cave. 

We decided that we needed to come up with a class treaty to make sure that we all have the best environment to learn in. We came up with lots of ideas and then managed to get them down to 4 things that we could follow. 

Here is us with our Treaty that we each signed to say that we would abide it. 

Our class treaty