Lord Nelson Visits Makaraka

Tawhirimatea loved having Lord Nelson in class today!  He is a special dog who belongs to Sam.  Sam is working on a project where he and Charlie are making a movie to show how pets can enhance your happiness and help you through your life. 

Nelson loved our class and certainly visited all the students in the school.  He is a very well trained dog and even had a shower before he came in! 

We can't wait to see Sam and Charlie's movie and the response they get from others about the happiness animals bring.  To quote Sam:  "Nelson cheers me up!  He is always there for me and I love how he plays!"

Tauranga Marimba Festival 2018

Marimba Festival 2018

Last week on Wednesday Nov 7 a group of students from Tawhirimatea travelled to Tauranga to perform in the Marimba Festival.  This is the first time that the festival has been held outside of Auckland and so we thought we'd better support it!  

The festival was held at Our Place in the centre of Tauranga City and is a community container mall type place.  It is perfect for small performances and events like this!  We had a great time and learnt all the songs before we went.  Gisborne students were certainly able to hold our own!  All that hard work paid off!  

We stayed at Papamoa and managed to squeeze in a swim in the sea before returning home.  What a great opportunity to learn some new songs all about the sea and perform with other students from the Bay of Plenty!  Everyone had a ball and we sincerely thank the parents and Jeremy for enabling us to be creative, have fun and show off some new skills!

Here are the songs we played: 

Surfin USA

The Ocean Refuses No River

Tauranga Moana

Tulevai

Ocean

Nervous Wreck

How Far I'll Go

Trillo - The Teacher's Turn! 

Drunken Sailor

Warming up for Athletics!

We have been practicing for our athletics day.  High Jump, Long Jump and just for fun discus and shotput.  It is so great having Mr Hocquard to help with his expertise!

We will be selecting the team to go to the inter-school competition in a couple of weeks.  People can only enter 3 events so combinations will be looked at.

Remember for High Jump:

Scissors only
Elevation
Speed
Angle of running.

Long Jump:
Speed
Propulsion
Fall forward not backward!

Looking forward to the cricket ball throw coming up!

Our fruit salad class groups!

We are a fruit salad because we all like to do different things and have a different personality flavour.  We need this in our life to make things interesting and we can learn more off each other! Celebrating our diversity is important to help everyone feel accepted!  

We love being a fruit salad class! 

Marimba Festival Fun!

What a great time we had with Jeremy today! Yes these students gave up their holidays to attend this ONZA funded workshop!  Wahoo to all of you!  Jeremy played recorder, drums, ukulele and helped us to sound awesome!  We have now played all the repertoire for the festival and only need to practice!

Jeremy was really impressed by the Gizzy attitude and the can do mindset!  We played for 3 hours and it didn't even feel like it!  What cool kids we have at Makaraka School!

For those who couldn't make it we will catch you up next term!  

Thank you Jeremy! 

Some cool snippets of the songs we have been learning: 

The Ocean Refuses No River


Ocean


Tulevai - from the book in our library.  Watch the solo improv by Angus!  

Central School's Amazing Production

How lucky were we to be invited to Central School's Production - This is Us.  We thought it was fabulous.  They had narrators and lots of interesting costumes and props.  Everything looked just stunning. 

The story was about their journey from the creation of Earth to present day and beyond.  The dancers in the creation did really well and performed to Holst's Jupiter!  A powerful piece of music. 

The giant sized puppets really show cased the European and Maori descendants and the make up of our culture.  It is no mean feat putting over 400 students on the stage and Central did a great job! 

I loved seeing Tim be a part of the show also!  He is often behind the scenes and he would have loved helping his old school!

It was great to watch and we hope we can return the hospitality next year for our production! 

Arohanui Central - Terrific effort!

Tamararo 2018

On September 1 Makaraka School performed our Atua bracket at the Tamararo competition.  It was a great performance and very polished.  These Waiata are named after our school classroom names and are about the Atua and the essence of what they stand for in Maoridom.  

Our class names in the order performed are: 

• Tangaroa - God of the ocean (a moteatea)
• Tanemahuta - God of the forest (Waiata-a-ringa)
• Tawhimatea - God of wind and storms ((Waiata Poi)
• Ruaumoko - God of the underground and volcanic action (Haka)
• Rongomatane - God of peace and land (Waiata-a-ringa)

Here is the video of us performing.  We hope you enjoy it!