Week 7 - Samoan Language Week

Talofa Lava Bloggers,

This week we have celebrated Samoan language week in Te Ana Ako.  We participated in a range of activities to develop our knowledge and awareness of Samoan Language and culture.  Some of our highlights were:

• Reading about, then creating a model of a fale.
• Finding out about and creating Siapo patterns.
• Using Samoan language to work on our Maths Place Value goals.
• Matching Samoan, Te Reo Maori and English family words as part of our pepeha work.

We have added some photos below.  Please check our blog later on as we focus on publishing our Siapo patterns that we have drafted in our Maths books too.

Week Seven - Teaspoon of Light Activity

Hi everyone,

Today our teachers told us a story, it started off like this “A young girl wakes up to get ready to visit her grandmother. As she gets up, she trips and tears her cloth of dreams…” (from TeRitoToi website).

The crazy thing was, this story had no pictures.  It was up to us to be a part of the story.  We used our faces and body language to show some of the emotions that the young girl would feel after her cloak of dreams ripped.

We then had the chance to create our own cloak of dreams for the girl in the story, to replace the one that was ripped.  To do this, we each had a square of coloured paper and a selection of pastels.  We brainstormed, then drew, beautiful things that we would like to dream about.

Finally, we had to use drama to create a magic thread that could sew each of the pieces of our quilt together.  We thought of all sorts of special things to add to our quilt. In a circle, we used our acting skills to add the different ingredients to the middle of our circle.  The final ingredient was a teaspoon of light from a dark tunnel to add hope.  Below, you can see the picture of our quilt creation, we hope you like it.

Please leave us a positive, thoughtful and helpful comment if you would like to find out more.

Week 6 - Playdoh Creations

Kia Ora Bloggers,

We have had a great week reconnecting with each other in our classes.  It has been a very creative week for us.  One of our challenges was to use our own packet of playdoh and prompts on this slide deck to get building and making.  As you can see, we had lots to explore and do.

Our final challenge was to sculpt something to represent something that we did while we were away from school.  You can see these creations in the slideshow below.  Please take some time to read the thoughtful explanations with many of these creations.

We would love to hear what you think. Please leave us some positive, thoughtful and helpful comments below.

Week 6 - Hello Again Dance and Greeting activity

Welcome back bloggers, we are very excited to be back at school and back together in our class, Te Ana Ako.  Today, we worked on a creative dance challenge to share a message with an audience.  Our task was to use dance to create a special new way to greet our classmates. Our teachers got the idea from the Te Rito Toi website.

To get ourselves warm, we practised moving at low, medium and high levels into space. It was important that we were respectful of the space that our classmates need to stay safe too.  Our next step was to list the different ways that we greet each other.  

With a buddy, we choreographed a simple dance that combined greetings to say hello again.  We also had to make sure we greeted each other from a safe distance.  The final step was to apply this dance to a piece of lively music.  Our first video shows you the creative fun we were having, coming up with a dance with our buddies.  

Here are some of our dance routines.  Are there any familiar types of greeting that you notice?  What do you think of our dances?  We would love some of your positive, thoughtful and helpful feedback.

Week 4 - Visitors Week

Kia Ora Bloggers,

This week we had some special guests join us in our online meetings.  We've taken screenshots and added them below to show you how surprised we were. Thank you, Miss Lane, Mrs Peterson and Mrs Law for joining us, reading stories and updating us with how you are going.

Miss Lane joins us on Monday

Mrs Peterson joins us on Wednesday

Mrs Law joins us on Thursday

We've also been really busy with our distance learning.  Some of the highlights were creating book reviews, using pixel art to create characters in maths, creating a poem page for a junior journal that included an audio file, building word finds, developing our drama skills in our class meetings and folding origami using Origami player.  We've included a few examples of these activities in the presentation below.  We would love some feedback.