City Gallery Visit Whakapapa- Our Stories

As  part of our Inquiry- Whakapapa: Our Stories, we visited the City Gallery. We learned about our connection to the Johnson Witehira mural ‘Ngā Kākano The Seeds’ (near Te Ngākau Civic Square) and created artworks based on our pepeha.

The City Gallery education team taught about the story behind the mural: the whakapapa of Taraika who Whāngahui-a-Tara (the great harbour of Tara- Wellington) is named after. He was a chief who descended from the great navigator Whatonga who sailed to Aotearoa in Kurahaupō Waka.

Some of us use Whānaganui-a-Tara in our pepeha as our moana (ocean) because it is our harbour too, so now we can make the connection between our story and Taraika.

After discussing how the different art elements (ideas) in the artwork, we headed to the gallery's classroom to create screen prints of our pepeha.

You can pop in to Tautoru to see all our finished art works.

It was wonderful to notice and learn about how the art around our city is connected to our personal stories. We hope we can keep spotting art all around and find new links to how art can fit into our lives.

The Gruffalo

This week we have been dialling up our Creativity to describe the Gruffalo. We revisited descriptive language such as adjectives, similes and metaphors.

Check out some of our author's work below.

Here is a read aloud of The Gruffalo story if you haven't read the book yet. We love it!

The Whakapapa of Ranginui and Papatuanuku

This week, we learnt more about the Atua and children of Ranginui and Papatuanuku. 

Haumiatiketike is the atua of wild and uncultivated foods. To explore our learning about Haumiatiketike, Ximena showed us some harakeke (flax) weaving she has been doing as harakeke is one of the children of Haumiatiketike. Then, we did some weaving.

Rūaumoko is the atua of earthquakes and volcanoes. Here is a story to learn more about this atua that we watched together.

After we learned about all of Ranginui and Papatuanuku's children, we did a sorting activity to sort who the atua's children belong to (e.g. Rongomātane's children are kūmara and carrots).

This afternoon we put together all of our learning so far and did some quick role plays of the whakapapa of Ranginui and Papatuanuku. Check out Seesaw to watch the videos.

Ask us at home to talk about the whakapapa of Ranginui and Papatuanuku!

Inquiry: Our Stories - The stories of Tangaroa and Tāwhirimatea

Through our inquiry 'Our Stories'  we will learn about whakapapa. Whakapapa is a Māori concept that helps us to make connections between our past, our environment and who we are today. We have been learning our pepeha (our family whakapapa) and have also begun to learn about the whakapapa of Te Ao Māori (the Māori world). Māori whakapapa begins with the story of Ranginui, Papatūanuku and their children. 

You can watch the story of Ranginui and Papatūanuku here:

This week we learned about two of Rangi and Papa's children: Tangaroa (the guardian or the ocean) and Tāwhirimatea (the guardian of the wind). We made windmills to connect to Tāwhirimatea who will make our windmills move outside, and we also went to the beach to learn about the story of Tangaroa. 

We did a quick beach clean-up to show how we can be kaitiaki of Tangaroa's children (all the sea creatures) then had some fun creating some art inspired by them. You might spot some whales, octopi and fish!