What's happening in Māhutonga Matariki?

By Mae, Anastasiya and Emily

We are focusing on quite a lot of things, one of many would be art. For art we are focusing on Marc Chagall's work. We are getting inspired by his work and turning it into our own art. Another thing that we are hugely focusing on is Inquiry. We are doing our own inquiries about New Zealand's history and digging deeper into our history. We are trying to think like historians and see different perspectives.

Everything we are learning at the moment is hard but while we are struggling our brain is growing and developing. Don't ever forget your brain grows no matter what age! We are learning to not give up if we make a mistake. By trying again or fixing it, we all agree that this is a crucial part of learning, and we respect our learning a lot. We also think it’s important to remember to express our feelings and ideas through art!

 Art: 

We have been making at inspired by Marc Chagall here are some examples of his work:

 

We made backgrounds,  added objects and people. We are learning to use only a limited amount of paint. We use white paint to build up a shadow with white paint before adding colour which helps develop the shadow to make the colour more visible. We blend different colours depending on our background. For example if we had blue and green backgrounds then our figures would be red and yellow so they would pop and you would be able to see the objects better.

Art in progress!

Inquiry:

For our Inquiry we usually get to choose our subject, the teachers do give us some borders for our questions. We enjoy making interesting inquiries around lots of different subjects. At the moment we are doing Inquiry around NZ history, we talked to some people and asked them what they are doing for inquiry. Most people are doing things about Māori and when  Captain Cook came to NZ, We are learning to use keywords when we are finding information. 

Once we finish our research we will be writing an essay about what we have been learning about. The essays are conclusions on our research showing our knowledge about this subject. We develop our knowledge around this subject because we think that Māoridom is a big part of our history and we are always keen to learn more about it. Learning how to do essays will help us in later life during college and university. We enjoy doing essays because they challenge us. We enjoy doing this topic because it is interesting and we enjoy learning about our past.