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.)