LATEST STORIES
Hakihea/December 2021
We’ve had such an amazing festive month with preparations for Kirihimate/Christmas! The excitement has
been tangible as our tamariki have been planning our Christmas party. They decided Santa needed to come and they helped decide on tasks such as making gifts, cards and decorations.
What is Christmas without whanau, friends, music, gifts, games and kai? We’ve had all of these and topped off with a Santa visit. Most of our clever tamariki were quick to tell us that it was really Ella pretending to be Santa, hahaha! Too smart for us hey! So we said the real one was busy making presents for Christmas back in the North
Pole. We’ve been reading about Santa’s journey in ‘A Kiwi Christmas’ pukapuka/story.
Our Kirihimete/Christmas party was so much fun. We had a balloon dance fest early on followed by morning kai in between sewing our own Christmas stockings. In between these we were busy having wind up Santa/ Elf races and dressing up in different Christmas hats. Then it was time for Santa’s visit for wā whāriki/mat time so we sang Santa the songs we’d been learning before settling into receiving gifts.
The whole day was magical butthe fun didn’t end in just a day. We had a whole month exploring Christmas and
interweaving our animal project into the mix too. We explored the questions “are reindeer real?” “where do they live?” We also looked at New Zealand’s native Christmas Tree, Te Pohutakawa tree. This was brought to life as we went out on our tsunami evacuation drill. One of our tamariki asked “why is the floor red?” and so we stopped to look at the Pohutakawa tree and it’s blossom on the floor. The excursion was filled with excitement with us spotting a field of
horses that came to say hello on our route. We love getting hands on with nature. There’s so much learning to be had.
Meri Kirihimete/Merry Christmas tamariki and whānau!