Kapa Haka

We had such an amazing day at Kapa Haka.

And our Tamariki were amazing! They definitely set the tone for the day.
Some of our brand new school students loved every moment of it and put a lot of energy and effort into making sure they knew all of the actions and songs. They were pretty awesome to see in the front row, and some of them have only been at school for a few weeks!

After Kapa Haka we looked through all the videos and photos, and then brainstormed all of the words we could think of, to do with Kapa Haka.

We came up with a very large list! Then we used photos of ourselves and cut them out and wrote in "speech bubbles" what we thought of the day and our favourite part.

Below are Paskalle, Monica-Jean, Neon and Charlotte with their awesome pictures talking about Kapa Haka.

A very big Thank You to all the whanau who helped out before and during the day and an extra big Thank You to Miss Kereru for making sure tamariki were ready and confident with their bracket! They rocked!

Kapa Haka Preparation

We have spent this week perfecting and fine tuning our Kapa Haka performance.
Tamariki have been putting a lot of effort into their performance so that we look remarkable for the day.

The Kapa Haka festival is happening next Wednesday right here at Te Mahia School. We will be performing from 9:30 (the powhiri) through to 10am where we will begin our bracket.

Some of our tamariki in Room 3 are brand new to school so spending time going over Kapa Haka has been very different from what they are used to, however they have been picking up all that they can and joining in like pro's.

Below are some photos from our practises. We look forward to seeing everyone at the performance next Wednesday (and if the weather decides it wants to rain the festival will be moved to Thursday).

Writing Star for Week 4

We have some very talented writers in Room 3, and Hikurangi is one of them. On Monday he decided he would write a story about halloween.

Hiku uses his top page to work out our new words, and writes his story on the bottom page. Hiku came up with this sentence by himself, and look at his beautiful handwriting.

I thought it was a very appropriate story for Halloween.

If your up in Room 3 and your lucky, Hiku may share some of his other stories with you!

"Halloween was cancelled because someone robbed the candy"

TEXTing

We've been thinking hard about why it is important that we learn to write in Room 3, and sometimes it's hard to understand why we might need the skills of writing in the real world.

Today a group of us played a game which had us all writing frantically and having a big laugh while we did it. We ended up with pages and pages of writing because of it!

The idea of the game was to take away the "chore" of writing and help us see that one of the main importances of writing is communication.

We all received a blank sheet of paper and a felt pen, with the first instruction that we weren't allowed to talk. We pretended our piece of paper was our "cell phone" or "Ipad/tablet". Then we had to "communicate" by writing messages to each other.

Our own pieces of paper had our names on them so that when we passed our "phones" to the person we were contacting they knew who the message was from, and they would reply on our "phone" so that we ended up with big lists of messages to and from one another. Some people were getting bombarded with lots of messages at once, but they would pile them up and work through one message at a time.

This activity was great fun, and we will be doing it again in class with different topics for discussion. We had a lot of people think hard about the messages they were "sending", and some people were attempting to spell the sounds that our phones would make when receiving and sending a text.

We even have some smaller people very eager to get into the skill of "communicating" with writing so that they can join us next time.

Lucy finding peoples names on our Reading Buddy lists.

Kaedyn writing Mrs Hitchy a message.

Rahkai getting bombarded with messages.