LATEST STORIES
Magnificent May! Haratua 2021.
We’ve had an action-packed month which was kicked off with a magnificent Mother’s Day celebration where our tamariki had a go at writing invitations to invite our mamas to a special High Tea for morning tea the Monday after Mother’s Day. During kai, our tamariki presented their mamas with the gifts and cards they made for them. This year, because our tamariki have been really interested in making things at the carpentry table, we decided to utilise these skills and create something unique and natural; some hand-made driftwood and seashell photo frames with a hand-drawn portrait of their Mama inside. Our tamariki took ownership of the whole process from sawing up the driftwood, drawing their own pictures and then fixing it all together with the cool-melt glue gun. Reggio Emilia inspired literature says the process is more important than the finished product with artwork but we were all impressed with the finished products this year. It was such a beautiful piece of mahi, there were even a few tears shed over them as it was, in some cases, the first time their tamaiti/child had drawn a picture with recognisable features. A truly heart-warming gift for our whānau to let them know how much their tamariki love them. Don’t worry Dads/Papas we have something special planned for you in September too!
To top off an amazing month, we having been delving into the depths of space for our new project. This project emerged after a few tamariki started talking about planets from one of our space pukapuka/books. Then it started expanding into imaginative play games and then rockets so we decided to extend this interest into a project. So far we’ve looked at the different planets and their features in our solar system. We’ve done lots of messy play including making moon balls and playing with black, sparkly playdough and space themed resources to go with them. Our teacher in training Renee has been setting up lots of fantastic space art like making planets with shaving foam and dye to create some awesome effects; scratch art with wooden pencils and making our own mini rockets with recycled materials. Iona and Wendy have been setting up some amazing science experiences making lava volcanoes 'from Venus' and exploring explosions and balloon rockets. We’ve also been playing space games like five aliens in a flying saucer, and reading space pukapuka/books at the end of mat time. Our tamariki’s favourites at the moment are; ‘How Maui slowed the sun’, ‘Man on the Moon’ and ‘The dinosaur that pooped a planet’ (this one ended with fits of giggles!). We’ve also been getting physical and acting out the story of Maui slowing the sun, and doing moon jumps and star jumps in our mara/garden which actually created an amazing talking point after one of our friends spotted marama/the moon in the sky. Another tamaiti/child said they could only see half the moon because the other part was in the water. This amazing discussion influenced mat time that day where we blasted off to space with our favourite rocket song and had a demonstration, using balls and a torch which created some great shadows on the wall, of how the shadow of the earth affects what the moon looks like to us. We’ve had some amazing discussions with our tamariki this month and discovering how mind-blowing their knowledge and theories are on this subject. We looking forward to continuing this journey with more space exploration on the way, and we’re going to start building a giant rocket of our own and have some more exploding rocket experiments. With Matariki approaching us too we’re going to be exploring the pūrākau behind Matariki and learning some new waiata for our kapa haka presentation for our Matariki celebration early July. Sooo much fun happening!