China

This week we 'flew' to China as part of our Globalisation topic. We discovered that

• Beijing is the capital city of China, 
• the Yangtze river is the 3rd largest river in the world, 
• you can only have 1 child in China, 
• many people live in apartments, 
• they have the largest population in the world - 1.3 billion people
• classes can have 30-50 children in them
• in class children sit in rows and not groups like NZ
• during morning tea time all the children have to do exercise for 20 minutes
• in China you can not walk on the grass in cities because there is not very much of it so the little bit they do have is very special

Mrs Zane taught us a Chinese ribbon dance. It was about the jasmine flower.

Miss Ko and Sophia are teaching us to speak Mandarin.
Ni Hao means hello.

Harakeke

 This week we did some flax weaving with Mrs Elmore because we have been learning about Maori culture. Maori used harakeke to make bags, candles, shoes, blankets, fishing nets, clothing and ropes. We used the harakeke to make a flax flower called a putiputi. It was quite tricky but with a bit of help we all made a fantastic flax flower.

The flax plant is like a family. In the middle is the baby, then the parents and on the outside are the grandparents. When harvesting flax you can only cut the grandparents. The baby must be protected at all times.

It was pretty hard folding the flax but we had a lot of fun.

These are some items that used to be made out of flax.

Here are our fantastic putiputi!