Te Ika a Maui Website

Our Journey - as explained by our ākonga ...

Learning the Story

For Storytelling (writing), Kākano 1 have been learning the story of 'Te Ika ā Māui'. To begin with, Miss Gardner told us the story which we all enjoyed!

Then we mapped the story by drawing each of the main events.

After this we stepped the story and created actions to help us remember each event as well as some of the important words and phrases.

Finally, we retold the story in different ways and did lots of writing about the characters, setting and events.

Throughout the term we also did lots of learning and activities that were related to the story of 'Te Ika ā Māui'. We learned the Māori alphabet, how to count and name colours in te reo. We also learned how to code the story and built some great Lego and craft creations.

During a class discussion some of us thought it would be a cool idea if we could share what we had created with other tamariki so that they could learn the story too. We thought it was an important story that tamariki in New Zealand should know. We then surveyed ākoka and kaiako in our kura and discovered that many people were not confident with their reo and pronunciation and some didn't know the story of 'Te Ika ā Māui' very well.

So we decided to help people learn more about Māori culture and language by sharing what we had learned in our class.

We brainstormed ways we could share our learning with other people and came up with a few ideas.

'Put an iPad in a box and send it to other schools.' (Phoenix)

'Send a video on my mum's phone.' (Naila)

'Go and visit kids at other schools and teach them.' (Tekouaterangi)

'Put our ideas on YouTube.' (Lincoln)

'Put it on Google so you can search it up.' (Ayden)

'Make a book and draw pictures of what we did.' (Kendall)

Then we talked about which idea would be the best for our class and we decided to go with Ayden's idea to make a website that people could find on the internet. We looked at some websites and talked about the things we liked the most such as nice colours and having photos, pictures and videos. Then a small group of us learned how to build a simple website. We then worked in smaller teams to create things we could put on our class website for other kids (and adults) to enjoy and to help them learn te reo Māori.

In our teams, we took on different roles such as illustrators, voice recorders, video crew, Lego masters, coding experts, presenters, website designers etc.