Wondering about our new Unit!

This afternoon we explored different materials to begin our unit of inquiry 'Fabrics and Fibres'.

Each small group had a bag of different fabric scraps to explore. We thought like scientists and these are some things we noticed:

 It's like tissue paper. 

This one is stretchy.

This one feels wooly and stretchy

This has a shiny side and the other side isn't.

I can see through this one.

I would make a badge out of this one.

This one is pink.

This one is super soft.

This feels like carpet.

This one is cold like the fridge.

The noise when I rub this is like rubbish rustling.

This one would be a good ninja headband.

The ones that don't stretch make a sound when you pull them.

This one feels like a beanie.

This one feels nice.

This one is pretty strong.

You can make pictures out of the fabrics.

Some of them feel rough and some feel elasticy and some feel soft.

How can we sort these?

We made a pile of stretchy fabric, loud fabric, and stretchy and loud ones and ones that aren't stretchy or loud.

We sorted them into colours. We folded them up too.

I did a pile of stretchy and also I made a pile of not stretchy ones.

We sorted them into stretchy and not stretchy.

We sorted them by colour and how they felt and if they made noise,

We sorted a little bit by colour and we sorted by how they felt.

We sorted by colour and stretchy and not stretchy and soft/fluffy and not soft/fluffy.

We sorted them by stretchiness and colour.

Kererū

This week we looked at the Matariki star Tupuārangi which is associated with food that comes from the sky and is linked to birds. Traditionally kererū were harvested around this time. It is also connected to the harvesting of elevated foods such as berries and fruits.

We learned lots of Kererū facts:

• Kererū only lay and look after one egg at a time
• They are important to our native trees as they the only still living NZ bird are able to eat and distribute the big berries.
• Some iwi call them Kuku or Kukupa
• If they live around houses they can often fly into windows
• They are one of the largest pigeons in the world
• It is now against the law to hunt them
• Kererū are native to NZ

Cathy from the library found some books for us so we could research the types of trees Kererū like. We used the books to draw a Kererū food forest that we could put our painted Kererū on. 

The collaboration was impressive by those involved and the finished piece looks fantastic!

Which Way is North East?

 We read about how to find Matariki and it mentioned it being in the North East direction. No one knew what that meant. Lots of us had heard about words like 'North' and 'South' before.

We did some research and learned about compass directions. We practiced using compasses and we found which direction Matariki would be! The compasses were very exciting and many children are keen to learn more about it. There is a compass app you can download on your phone if you don't have one at home and your child would like to explore further.

Matariki

 We have started finding out about Matariki by looking at the star Tupuanuku.

We found out the 'tupu' means to grow and 'nuku' is from the word Papatuānuku - it is the star associated with food grown from the ground.

We have been reading about how Matariki signifies the start of Winter and it meant that people had to make sure food was harvested and stored to last the cold months.

We learned about what a pataka was  - many of us had seen one at the Hamilton Gardens before!

We have done some foam printing star art and folded some paper pataka.