Harvesting harakeke.

Whaea Saf took us down to the creek where there is some beautiful harakeke growing by the stream. She sang a lovely karakia before telling us which strands of harakeke we could cut: Not the baby in the middle, nor its parents on either side, but the grandparents on the outside. After she'd cut some off, she showed us how to weave a star (which is what we'll be doing next week) and how to make a "clapper" which used to be given to kids to keep them busy while mum weaved. We carefully collected up the flax that had been cut and took it back to class.

Matariki: Weaving fish from card

We started our Matariki topic by reading the story about the 7 Fish of Matariki and then tried to weave our own fish out of cardboard strips as a practice run for weaving them out of harekeke (flax). It was pretty hard as our hands were a bit too small to for the strips - but we persevered and here are some of the results.