LATEST STORIES
Matariki Celebrations 2023
Matariki is a particular time of celebration in New Zealand that marks the start of the Māori New Year. It is a time of reflection, remembrance, and coming together as a community. Matariki is on the 14th of July (Friday) this year, but celebrations are already beginning. The older children in our centre were invited to the Te Kauwhata library to do arts and crafts with Alanah (one of the librarians). We were all pretty excited about designing using paper plates and making matariki kites. There was so much concentration going on from the children as they designed and created their masterpieces with glitter, stickers, felts, and crayons. After creating these wonderful masterpieces we got to listen to a beautiful story about a fox which was read to us by Lynley (Lynley is the librarian who comes to our centre to read a couple of stories once a fortnight).
In the Aroha room (under 2), we celebrate Matariki in a beautiful way to teach our tamariki about Māori culture and create meaningful learning experiences such as Matariki waiata, Matariki-inspired artworks and decoration for our baby's visual learning. In Wairua and Mana room (over2's), we have also been learning some songs, that we would like to showcase at our own Matariki concert on Thursday 13 July 2023. Through these experiences, we have been doing a variety of art activities that revolved around the stars, including painting paper (yellow) and using glitter to make stars (they were cut out later), making handprint stars (then painting paper black for a night sky), and also doing what we took from our activity in the library and bringing the idea back to the centre for all of the tamariki to enjoy, and that was using paper plates to make Matariki kites.
We celebrated Matariki in the centre with afternoon tea. We brought connection from our homes into the centre in the sense of making vegetable soup. Thank you everyone for the contribution you made by bringing in a vegetable that we got to use for our soup which was then enjoyed by our tamariki, their whanau, and teachers at our Matariki concert. The children did their concert singing Matariki Macarena and Tirama Tirama then Hayden’s (son of Te Aroha, our cook, in the under 2's) koro blessed our Kai after sharing with us the history of one part of Matariki. Thank you to all our parents and whanau for being part of this incredible experience, our first Matariki celebration in the centre.