'The Great Waka of Tama Rēreti' - Matariki Whānau Day

Our 2019 Matariki Whānau Day was a huge success, with each whānau group coming together to celebrate Te Ao Māori through the Arts.

Carl and Nik's whānau group (with fantastic support from Cloe!) watched and listened to some different versions of The Great Waka of Tama Rēreti.

We then got in to groups to create backgrounds and moving figures for a paper theatre.

With the help of Carl's height, we filmed our movie in just a few takes.

Later, we used GarageBand to record some background noises, such as the Taniwha, water and fire.

A special mention must go to Matilda, who did an exceptional job of narrating the story.

Check out our finished product below!

Apirana Taylor

We had a special visitor at school on Wednesday. Apirana Taylor is a storyteller, an artist, a musician and even a magician! He entertained us with stories and shared many of his instruments that he uses to help tell his stories.

We helped Apirana to recite his poem: 

Janet's Visit

We have been learning about different people in our community. We are also interested in what inspires people to write.
Janet (Ben's mum) came in to talk to us this morning about her writing career. She has a published novel called, "the shark party." We all thought it was super interesting.  She read us a page of her novel with a character called Carla. She also read us two poems, one was about swiss chocolate, and one was about muse. Muse is a cloud that has ideas for writing in it. Swiss chocolate is called chocolat. She came up with the muse poem when she was walking her dog on the beach. Most of us want to be writers after hearing Janet talk about it. Some of us had questions about her career and we found out her favorite writer is J.K Rowling,  and some people had the same favorite children's author. When she was a kid, her favorite writer was Canadian writer who lived on an island.

By Liv

Lala: Film maker- Who is in our community?

Our inquiry is about, “Who is in our community.” We are learning about different people and their stories. Yesterday, Lala came in to talk about her work as a film director for documentaries and told us some stories.

She showed us part of 2 films/ documentaries that she has made. We thought they were very cool and interesting.

Then she told us a story that she and John made when they were young. It was a silly story about how he lost his finger. It made us all chuckle.

Lala told us how she got her interesting name. She was in a big family of 6 siblings. She was the 5th of 6 girls. Her mum did not know what to call her as she had run out of girl’s names. A fijian high chief in the village where she was born suggested that she would name the 6th child if it was a girl. The baby was a girl, she was called Lala after Adi Lala. We asked Lala a bit more about the high chief in an email. Here is her response:

“The chief was Adi Lady Lala Mara - a high chief of the Rewa province. Adi is pounced Andi (with the and i in the Maori pronunciation way) and Adi is the Fijian word for high born chiefly women. And the British gave her the title 'Lady' too. In Fiji if you name someone your name they become your yaca,(pronounced ya-the). Which means namesake but it also becomes special bond like a godparent. So she was my yaca and also officially became my godmother. And in Fiji when I was  kid I was very skinny and white and Fijian people used think it was hilarious to call me Adi Lala because I looked so different from her. So Fijian woman when I was  little and sitting on the bus with Eme my nanny used to squeeze my cheeks and say, "Isa Adi Lala"  and laugh their heads off...Tell everyone to go to Fiji for the holidays it's a pretty cool place.”

After she told us about when she found drawings in a cave on the west coast of New Zealand. They were drawn from  Taipei, the man who stopped the first fight between Maori and captain cook.

She told us we can help her fundraise for her documentaries to go on TV, which would be very cool. We would have to write to NZ on air to convince them to fund the show so that we can watch it on Maori TV. Her new documentary is about writers in New Zealand and will include the writer’s walk.

By Burton and Isaac

Apirana Taylor Visit

Apirana Taylor came into school today. He showed us various musical instruments that he has collected as he travelled to different countries. He also told us some stories, sang some songs and recited some poems. We liked the story about the lolly tree because it was funny and interesting. Apirana used his instruments in some of his stories and used great facial expressions. He used his body language to entertain us.

We thought that he was inspiring because he told us that he got his letters muddled up at school and had dyslexia, but he still really loved writing!  He said he enjoyed writing as much as the other kids liked art because he could paint a picture in the reader's mind.

By Jack H

This is the "Manu Roreka" poem that he performed:

Manu Roreka from Matariki on Vimeo.

Here are some photos of Apirana's visit:

Apirana Taylor from Matariki on Vimeo.