We learnt about a festival called Te Mire Ura. It is a Cook Island celebration and all the best dancers come together and have a competition to see who is the best. Here is a poster we made on “glogster” that explains more about it.
There are lots of beautiful flowers in the Cook Islands, so every year they have a special festival to celebrate. Here is some information about what happens at the Tiare Festival.
The Cook Islands have lots of different celebrations and events that we don’t have in New Zealand. One of them is called “Vaka Eiva”. It is a contest held to celebrate the use of canoes in the Cook Islands. Here is the information that we found out about it.
Our topic this term is “Celebrations” so the Year 6s at our school are doing a cultural rotation to learn about celebrations. Room 25 started in their own class and learnt about Cook Island celebrations. This keynote is all about the Cook Island Constitution festival called “Te Maeva Nui”.
Today is October 15 – Blog Action Day. It is when bloggers from all around the world stop to discuss a certain issue. This year it is poverty. Poverty affects almost half the world, and it isn’t just in developing countries. It is estimated that 1 in 10 children live below the poverty line in developed countries! Here are our thoughts about poverty.
This year for production the theme was the environment. The production was called “River Journey” and it was based on the story “River Song” written by Gaelyn Gordon. I was in Room 21 because Mrs T was the big boss of the production so we had to be split up. Lucky me I got to be in Room 21. Miss A was really kind to us. There were 5 groups. The picnic party, the clean up crew, the SPCA group, the junk to funk group and of course my group – the Greenpeace protest. M.M was the leader of our group. Her job was to chant something and we had to copy her. The other people in my group were K.L, E.S, J.H, M.H, J.M, T.H, S.K and J.L.
We had a lot of practises and I mean a lot! I can’t even count how many practises we had. It was a long process because first we had to choose what we had to say and then we had to decide on the costumes we would wear. After we got all that sorted we had to start practising. It was really frustrating at times because if our group did something wrong we had to start again. The first time we practised my group started again 7 times! It was funny because I nearly lost my voice from chanting so much!
After we knew what we were doing we had to perform in front of an audience. I couldn’t imagine what it was going to be like performing in front of people. What if I made a mistake or what if something went wrong and we ruined the show? It was time to show what we had learnt and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.
I didn’t know what the other classes were doing so at the dress rehearsal we got to watch all the performances. There were lots of performances like the choir, the year 4s, the hip hop group and much more. One of my favourite performances was the hip hop group. Their actions were strong and very entertaining to watch.
At the matinee performance there weren’t many people watching so it wasn’t so scary. On Wednesday night the auditorium was packed with people and there were lights shining on us and everyone was cheering. It was like we were celebrities!
Over the last few weeks we have been having practises for the 2008 Senior School Production. During the practises I worked the sound system but I knew I wouldn’t be working the sound system on the nights. I got really annoyed with the computer when it delayed playing a track when a C.D was in the disk drive. Miss S then got annoyed with me because the song wasn’t playing! I even got death threats (lol) for playing the song “We’re all in this together” from High School Musical (not that I blame them it’s an annoying song but it’s OK).
Finally on Monday 15 September I found out what my job was…. it was better than the sound machine….. it made more noise than my brother on Halo (that’s pretty loud). It was the….. FOG MACHINE (that made a loud noise). It was my dream behind-the-scenes job! It took quite a while to warm up and it played up sometimes but it was cool. I sat behind the choir and waited for my time to shine (or mist up).
The news item came on and L.D and E.S introduced EPS News and E.S said “and now we will cross to J.M at Waikikamoucau Creek”. I was prepared for public humiliation. On the screen I introduced myself and J.C the mad scientist (who had my glasses on) and after he said “jumped into my bucket of 02928 and shot out the window” F.H the mutant fish appeared. I screamed and then interviewed him and told him the interview was over. F.H slapped me in the face with his fin.
It was a little while before I had to turn the fog machine on, it was after the characters Sophie and Martin met Wai in his underwater home, and again after the choir had sung and when the character Mud died. Sometimes the fog machine just stopped working for a short period of time, but it was a good job and I liked being the fog machine guy.
This term we have been looking at Pou Pou – the carved posts used to hold up the roof of a Wharenui. We sketched our own unique Pou Pou and used pastels and indian ink to present them.
During Term 1 two people from our classroom were in a special art class to make a flag that represented our room. To create this flag they used an art process called “stencilling” and they painted the flag using special fabric paints. Check it our below!