Manaaki

On Wednesday some of us explored the idea of manaaki.

Manaaki is the māori word for support. It means to take care of, look out for and show respect to someone.

So what type of people can we reach out to when we need it? Here's a list we made of the qualities these people might have:

Caring
Supportive
Understanding
Loyal
Connected
Kind
Loving
Trustworthy
Empathetic
Someone with great listening skills
Sincere

We thought of 5 people each that we could look to for support. We traced around our hand and wrote the person on each finger. It feels great knowing we have so much support in our lives. These people were whanau members, friends and teachers.

The Four Dimensions of Hauora

Today we started learning about hauora (well-being). We learned that hauora is made up of four dimensions. These are;

• Taha tinana (physical well-being)
• Taha wairua (spiritual well-being)
• Taha hinengaro (emotional well-being)
• Taha whānau (social well-being)

Just like a whare (house) needs four strong walls to stand tall, we need to keep all four dimensions of hauora in balance to feel happy, healthy and positive.

We discussed how we can improve each dimension in our lives and wrote our ideas on strips of paper.

Finally we weaved the strips of paper together. If all four dimensions are in balance we feel good. We feel like the happiest and healthiest version of ourselves. We are looking forward to exploring hauora further. How do you take care of your hauora (well-being)?

Our New Haka

Thank you to those who came along to Jerome Kavanagh's parent workshop. As well as learning a little about his instruments and the Maori myths and folklore that are an important part of his work, we were given an interesting introduction to our new school haka.

Jerome had spent some time working with our children discussing our local area, what we care about and who we are at Bromley. Many of the children's thoughts around this were included in our new haka in some way, including the growth of our students, the local rivers and the Port Hills over looking our school.

The haka is still in early stages of development, but the children are so excited to have had a part in creating it and look forward to performing it with pride when completed.



Please visit Jerome's website if you would like to learn more about what he does.

The Jerome Experience

Today we participated in the Jerome experience. Jerome taught us about a variety of Pasifika musical instruments.

We were lucky to hear him play the beautiful melody of the Pūtātara (the sea shell horn) and the Nuguru (whale tooth nose flute). 

He told us stories about the Māori goddess of music, Raukatauri. Then it was our turn to make our own musical instrument using clay.

Visual Mihimihi

We have been busy working on our visual mihimihi. This art project is going to part of our About Me slide show project.

Firstly we planned out how we could visually represent our home, our whānau, ourselves and our school. 

Some of us decided to use symbols to show this as well as incorporating kowhaiwhai patterning. We learned that different cultures have particular symbols and patterns that are important to them.

Next we slowly worked through the process of sketching a self portrait. For some of us, this was the first time we had taken the steps to create a self portrait with the correct proportions. 

Now we are transferring our plans to larger paper. This will be coloured in with pencil so that there is a contrast with the pencil sketch self portrait.

Please come into Koru 1 and check out the finished product. We will be discussing all the different elements of our art works and what the symbols mean to us with our classmates.