Our trip to the Auckland zoofari

yay said the children it is the fun run.on Monday Room one and NRP went to the zoo in Auckland. every one favourite was the lions because they have yellow bright eyes. the other favourite animal was the OTA cause they were cute.   

Our awesome assembly for wahanga 3.

It was a cold and wet Friday morning when Ngā Rau Puawai were sitting inside the school hall, preparing for their hui-a-kura. I was pacing up and down and trying my best not to throw up.

We were just about to get ready as 10:00am lingered near, our whanau had already arrived and were waiting at the back.  We were pumped and ready when all of a sudden a voice came over the speaker "Assembly will be postponed until the rain has cleared"

The hall erupted! "No!" screamed the children.

"This is Ngā Rau Puawai's assembly slide. They did the Sasa dance and Maori speeches and project island and the zoofari. They performed everything in the hall" from Luey

Na kona ahau - school speech competitions.

This year for the first time, Kawakawa primary school had speech competitions. Ngā Rau Puawai had an extra challenge because they were asked to present their speeches in Te Reo Maori.

Firstly, the tamariki wrote their speeches in english, and the topic was "I am from..."
Secondly, with the help of some of the teachers and kaiawhina, we translated our speeches into maori.
Whaea Sally could only choose 2 students to represent our class in the middle and senior speeches.

She chose Lulu and Kahukura and we were very proud of them.

Bringing back the bird song

On Tuesday, Ngā Rau Puawai and Room 1 went to the Ipipiri islands with Ria and Debbie from the Project Island Song team. Before we went to the islands we learnt a few things about what the Project island team does and how they look after the islands and keep them pest-free.

The tamariki really enjoyed what they had learnt and the haerenga to project island. Their mission afterward was to create a D.L.O to show their learning.


Kahukura, Manawa-Rangi, Te Aroha, Kianni and Nevaeh put together a Project island movie trailer.

Rawiri, George, Lulu and Khyan did an animation.

Righteous and Mahina put together an acrostic poem.


Ria, Debbie and the rest of the team were really happy with the learning that we shared. Thank you to the Joyce Fisher Charitable Trust for supporting such an awesome kaupapa.

2019 SBOI Culture Festival

Kawakawa primary school were very fortunate to host the 2019 Southern Bay of Islands Culture festival.  We kick started our morning with a powhiri whakatau for all of the other kura who came then first up was Te Mana Tamariki o Kawakawa. This is the teina roopu at our kura, Matua Horrace and Whaea Whetu take the group and Ngā Rau Puawai were cheering for 2 of our students who are in the group - Peyton and Maiah-Lee. Check out their performance.

The girls in Te Rau Poumanawa have been practising hula for the past few weeks. They have been learning this dance to help them loosen up with their kapa haka performance, this was one of Whaea Sally's favourite items for the day.  If you look closely, you can see some of our NRP girls - Jojo, Kahukura and Manawa-Rangi.

Last but not least our competition group Te Rau Poumanawa performed a few items. We were very proud of all our students from Ngā Rau Puawai who performed this afternoon - Zowyn, Jeremiah, Kyle, Kahukura, Manawa-Rangi and Jojo.

FUN FACT ALERT!!

Do you like the backdrop on our atamira - stage?

It's actually a kite painted by a wonderful friend of Whaea Verbina - her name is Theresa Raihana. The two beautiful wahine on the kite are Whaea Verbina and Whaea Sally's nannies - their names are Marohia Kupe and Paretauira Hapimana and they are from Waikato.

Hui-ā-kura TAKE 2!!

Today we had our second hui-ā-kura for the school year. For the past 4 weeks, we have been preparing and practising all of our items.  When we started planning for our assembly, we tried to work with a theme "Te Marama" however, some of us negotiated with Whaea Sally and changed up some of the items we originally planned.  Below you will see the slide we showed at assembly, all of the moving GIFS that you see are animations that we created ourselves using google slides, screencasting and GIFY.com

One of our reading group called Te Roopu Maihi recreated their own version of Maui and Tama-nui-te-Ra.  Te Aroha rewrote the story, Rawiri selected the music and together with George and Righteous, the group animated the story using google slides.

The kotiro in our class wanted to do a just dance and chose wolves by Selena. To switch things up in assembly the tamariki decided to create some of their own dance moves in the routine, they recorded their new dance on greenscreen and we turned it into a kizoa movie. Here it is.

The boys decided to do the same as the girls but they chose "You don't know you're beautiful" from One Direction, here is their video below.

Unfortunately because of time, Te Roopu Tuwhare reading group could not share with the kura their shadow puppet play "Rona and Te Marama" so we have decided that we will show this item next term

Tell us what your favourite assembly item is in our comments, or even better leave us some feedback and feedforward to work on for next time. Hei konei ra!

Word clouds for our Mums

This morning Whaea Sally had us creating our own word clouds for a mother's day treat, we explored wordart.com and made hearts for our mums. Since we were pushed for time, we were able to put in some of the words that describe our mums. Some of us chose to make our word clouds for other special ladies in our lives who are like a mother to us too.

Here are our word clouds

The Kawa of Care

Since we are a digital 1:1 chromebook classroom, it is important for the tamariki to learn about the Kawa of Care, this is an agreement the students follow before they receive their very own chromebook.

We worked in pairs and chose one of the agreements in the kawa of care, and created a poster to display in our room.  We decided to draw our posters with felts, here are some of our posters in a google slide.

It was really exciting when we received our very own chromebook, It came wrapped in ribbon and balloons and the whole kura sang a waiata for us.

After all of the learning we did around the Kawa of Care, we thought of a fun way to share what we had learned and created a Kawa of Care rap, Whaea Sally found an instrumental and some of us used audacity to recored our rap song. We showcased our waiata at our assembly.  Here it is here:

Do you like the kawa of care? which one is your favourite agreement? which one do you think is hard to follow? Leave a comment on this post and let us know.

Ngā uaratanga-ā-kura - Our school values

Nau mai, haere mai ki te Rangitaki o Ngā Rau Puawai 2019. Our tamariki kick started our term by revisiting our school values, Whakaiti (Respect), Mana Motuhake (Responsible) and Manawaroa (Resilience).  Here is the planning slide from our Māhere Ako:

Firstly, we did a bus stop activity in small groups, each paper had a different area in the school and it was our job to discuss what our 3 R's looked like and sounded like in each area. Whaea Sally took all of our ideas and turned them into word clouds using wordart.com, they are hanging up in our class where we can always see them.

Next, we acted our different scenarios and showed what the 3 R's looked like, and also what it didn't look like.  We thought about a really neat way to share this learning with our kura and decided to create an advert - we were inspired by the links ads and wanted to make our own.  We had to come up with our own scene, and together we thought of a funny slogan "if you don't have it - it stinks".  Here is our ad that we showed the kura at our assembly, we used our ipads and movie maker.

We look forward to reading your feedback and feedforward. Ka kite ano.