Kia ora BestStart whānau. Here in our Pre-school our room planning has been around Te reo Māori.
We have been doing lots of activities that the kids have thoroughly enjoyed. We created a Kāinga in our display cabinet to support our Te Tiriti o Waitāngi / Te ao Māori room.
We had set up a Te Reo counting table using counting frogs, Te Reo number cards and made “ number mats”. Tamariki placed the correct number of frogs on a number mat then found the corresponding number card. We then counted the frogs together in Te Reo Māori. This activity gave tamariki opportunities to practice using one of the official languages of Aotearoa.
They also worked on their early numeracy skills such as number recognition and counting concrete objects 1/1 .Another memory game was where we each had a map of Aotearoa New Zealand with pictures on it.
The pictures were showing aspects and people involved in our Aotearoa history. This included the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitāngi. Through this game we learnt about some of the important people from our history, names of native birds, Māori designs and some cities of Aotearoa.
We also created our own art work using Māori symbol and kōwhaiwhai patterns. We are having so much fun learning all about te ora Māori here at Pre-school.