Celebrating te wiki o te reo Māori: Weaving harakeke

 Room 2 has been very busy celebrating te wiki o te reo Māori and using te reo in our classroom. We do use te reo quite a lot in our classroom daily, so we have tried using more kupu and had a go at learning something new about Māori culture and tikanga. 

We have been focusing on learning new kupu about our feelings. Every day we ask each other about how we are feeling and children have been learning to use the kupu like pai (good), ngenge (tired), mokemoke (lonely), riri (angry), and hiakai (hungry). 

It has been really amazing to watch children use these kupu during their play or when asked about how they are feeling. 

One of the new things we have learnt this week was about harakeke. How to harvest harakeke and the tikanga around the use of harakeke. 

We went to find some harakeke at our kura. 

We learnt that we needed to do a specific karakia for harvesting. We also learnt that harakeke plants represent tupuna (grandparents),  awhi rito (parents) and rito (child). 

We also talked about when it is not allowed to cut harakeke, those times are when it is dark, and when it is raining. We do not walk over harakeke either. 

Whaea Arna was very kind and gave us some harakeke for weaving. Before weaving, we did the karakia before using it. It is important to show respect for harakeke. 

We weaved pīwakawaka together. 

Fantastic work at making pīwakawaka. We then sand a song about pīwakawaka!