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Kia Orana from BestStart Mount Eden!
This week at BestStart Mt Eden, Paua and Pipi came together to celebrate a very special occasion ‘Te ‘epetoma o te reo Māori Kuki ‘Airani’ (Cook Island Language Week.) The theme of this year was ‘Ātuitui'ia au ki te Oneone o tōku 'Ui Tupuna’ which means ‘Connect me to the soil of my ancestors.’
In honour of this celebration, we invited tamariki to join in with a rich variety of learning experiences such as; sharing whānau photos, shell exploration, painting, crown making, dancing, drumming, pole weaving and dressing up in beautiful bright colours and flowers. From these moments we were all able to explore and learn together about different aspects of this wonderful culture. We even learnt some new words and practiced them through the week- ‘Kia Orana’ being very popular with Paua tamariki.
Our wonderful kaiako Josie, who led the way with pole weaving, shared her knowledge and expertise alike. We all had a go at weaving the pole using flax leaves and through this we discovered that in Cook Island culture it is tradition to have weaved poles at your celebrations and events. So, with this in mind we kept our decorative creations up for the week for all to see.
We’d like to give a special thanks to Paul, one of our Pipi Dad’s, who brought along his personal paddles all the way from The Cook Islands. Through show and tell we learnt that these paddles were gifted to him for his 21st Birthday, are custom made and hand crafted- as tradition in The Cook Islands. Tamariki were fascinated learning about this culture and seeing it first-hand.
Until next year everyone!