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Ka Pai Our All Blacks
“Plant trees you’ll never see”. This is one of the famous All Blacks quotes. At Best-Start Parkside we have three values our planning is focused on- Respect, Relationships, and Responsibility. These are the core values of our famous All Blacks too. What better way to foster these, through celebrating our heroes during the last Rugby World Cup games?
At BestStart Parkside we celebrate many cultural language weeks, festivals and national events. Rugby World Cup 2023 was very near and dear to most of our families, and a Kiwi culture which had to be celebrated. We had a very big pre-semi-finals build up celebration at our centre, 100% sure that our mighty All Blacks will win. Children came dressed up in their All Blacks jersey, in black and white colours.
We had our centre decorated with New Zealand flags and All Blacks Flags. This was a great learning opportunity for our children to recognise and learn about their country’s heritage and famous game and team. We began to learn and sing the lyrics of the New Zealand National Anthem, and Haka. Lots of discussions around team work, happened, as we constantly remind children about working together as a team in our Preschool.
Children worked in groups to make the flags for display. These discussions and activities fostered general knowledge building and literacy. Most of the children will always recognise the All Blacks flag. Many opportunities were created to talk about numbers, as we looked at what number jersey each player wore, how long and wide the rugby field was, how many scores, tries, were created. These discussions fostered interest in numbers and counting. It was so pleasing to see most of the parents were on board with this celebration and made an effort to even buy new jerseys for their children to wear on the dress up day.
This event not only brought the Parkside families together but the whole nation. And as our CEO Anthony Ryall commented on our story, “Team work makes the dream work-even from this far away”. So true and we were so proud to be part of this event.