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Cook Island Language Week

Kia Orana. This week is Cook Island Language Week. We were able to experience children playing knucklebones and dancing and singing on an old movie our teacher found. The children have a lot of rhythm and seem very happy.

We also made our own class Tivaevae which is a traditional ‘quilt.’ We made ours out of two pieces of squared coloured paper. One piece was folded into quarters and we drew our design on that one. Then we cut them out (which was not as easy as it sounds) and stuck them onto the other piece of paper.

Some of our classmates are Cook Islanders and they shared their knowledge of their language with us. We chose a word or phrase we liked, wrote it on a strip of paper and added it to our class display. We learned that ‘meitaki’ means thank you, ‘ae’ means yes and ‘aere ra’ means goodbye (which is similar to ‘haere mai’ we say in Te Reo Maori.)

 

Room 6’s Matariki learning

This year, Matariki was on Friday, the 14th July. We were still on school holidays and the whole country enjoyed a public holiday. Last week when we came back to school we did a few fun Matariki activities.

We learned that the Matariki stars are a cluster of stars called the Pleiades and they rise in the early morning when it is still dark. They can be seen as the ‘eyes of god.’

We were looking at the Gregorian calendar which was introduced by Pope Gregory in 1582. This calendar is used by most countries in the world and the New Year begins in January. Matariki is the Maori New Year which is in July. Maori spent time together making memories and thinking about those who passed away. They also think about their goals for the future.

During the week we also learned how to play knuckle bones (ruru), which is a game Maori children played many years ago. We found five small stones each from around the school and learned how to throw them up and catch them on the backs of our hands. Then we had to gather the stones one by one each time we threw them up. We soon worked out it is easier not to throw them up too high!! Later in the week we started developing our own games of knuckle bones. Some of our parents said they played knuckle bones when they were younger. They are called different names around the world – Moa in Tonga, Aki in Samoa and Jackstones in the Philippines.

We made Matariki stars using cardboard circles and coloured wool. At the top of this post, is our new class display.

 

Quality comments

Our challenge this term  is to comment on our buddy class or individual blogs every week this term. It is important to read the blog post first so we can write a comment that is specific and thoughtful.

We have been crafting our blog comments first using the word lists if we need them.  This enables us to check our comments make sense before we post.

Do you have a top tip for writing quality blog comments?

A visitor from Poutama Class

We were excited to be able to welcome Miss Salton to Room 6. Miss Salton was farewelled from one of our Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu buddy classes,  Poutama Class, a couple of weeks ago. She will be helping lots of classes in Levin with their Cybersmart learning.

We explored our Digital Footprint over 24 hours and recorded all the places we had visited online. We noticed how our digital footprint can grow very big very quickly. It is important to be kind, thoughtful and helpful online so we can create a positive digital footprint.

Sharing our first Screencasts

After practising creating our first screencast last week we were excited to share them on our edublogs.

We had to remember some important steps before publishing our posts  including:

  1. Sharing our screencast in Google Drive so it is visible to anyone looking at our blog
  2. Changing the display size so our video displays correctly

Mrs Grant created a screencast with these instructions on our class site too.

When our posts were published we used the widget in our class blog to visit the blogs of our class to check they were visible.

Click the images below to listen to some of our screencasts.

Learning how to Screencast

This week we used the screencast App on our Chromebooks for the first time. There was lots to think about so we started by reading a text we had written. This will help us focus on using our device and the screencast app confidently.  Also we can practise how we are speaking when we record our voice. When we listened to our recordings we noticed that our voices sound a lot different.

You can read more about this on our class site and see a helpful video too.

Tangrams

Today we explored Tangrams to practise and gain confidence navigating our keyboard and keyboard shortcuts.

A tangram includes 7 shapes or polygons that can be moved, rotated and flipped to create objects, animals and people.

First we practised the keyboard shortcuts to move, rotate and flip. Then we tried some of the Tangram challenges.

Visit our learning site to see more about the Tangram Challenge.