The Matariki Rocket

During the week we have been listening to a Matariki story called Twinkle, Twinkle, Matariki.

Our black playdough had glitter throughout and we used it as a galaxy for our rocket ships to transverse.

Astronauts Toby and Cece helped to put together a Rocket ship to explore space.

Fellow Astronaut Aria and Cece added the external features - which included the addition of family members wearing spacesuits.

Astronaut Austin also came went for a ride.

Emily added some finishing touches to our rocket

We counted down several times before we blasted into the unknown.
We all managed to have different experiences as we explored Space- Cece saw a black hole   and we all saw the stars of Matariki.

 

As you can see, this is Cece's black hole, that is trying to suck her Dad, the astronaut inside.

This is Astronaut Aria and her Mum 

Here we have the second black hole that sucked up 

This orange astronaut is looking through the small window pane (orange square).

Planting our Winter Crops

 As part of our Matariki Celebrations we are cleaning our garden and planting our new plants for the rest of the year as the traditional time for doing this is when the Matariki stars appear in the sky. After some discussion as a group we had decided on peas, because lots of us like to eat them, Silver beet for our chickens, Kale and broccoli. When our plants arrived we noticed something strange about the broccoli in the picture of the tag on our seeds, it was purple! Who ever heard of purple broccoli? We are all very excited to see these seedlings grow and to find out of the broccoli really is purple! We also planted some flowers in our flower garden to be bright and beautiful and to give the bees some food through winter when there are not so many flowers blooming for them. 

Emma said "I love the yellow flowers"

    

Sidney as ked to plant a yellow plant

Emily Said " I want to plant a pea please"

Léo said to Ava "Guess what this is a purple broccoli! Have you ever heard of a purple broccoli?"

Making Kites for Matariki

 Flying Kites is a traditional part of the celebrations for Matariki. We decided that as part of our Matariki celebration we were going to make our own kites and have a try at flying them in the playground.

Harvesting our Kumara

Today was an exciting day! We were finally going to harvest our kumara and see what was growing underneath all those leaves. We started by pulling back the leaves to find out where the roots of the plant were and then Nikki dug around them. At first it seemed that we would be disappointed as we couldn't see any kumara attached to the roots. Then "Surprise" up popped a great big kumara we were so excited that we let our a cheer. Harvesting our kumara at this time has special significance as Matariki is traditionally a time for harvesting winter crops, refreshing the garden and planting new crops to be ready for spring. It was a great feeling to be part of a ritual that has been happening in Aotearoa for hundreds of years. 

 

Creating our worm farm!

Our worm farm has been out of action for a few months now and with our new focus on sustainability we decided it was time to get it set up again. We read "Our wriggly worm farm" and learnt lots of interesting facts like compost creates smelly gases that harm our environment and that we can help out by composting some of our food.  Worm farms are a great way to do this, helping our environment too, how awesome is that!  Well we really want to be helpful kiwi's so we are going to try our best at being more sustainable too!

Kaiako Deanne brought a box of worms, how hilarious the tamariki thought, there were shrieks of giggles, who knew you could buy a box of worms!!  1000 of them, ewwwww!! These worms are just the right worms for our farm, they are called Tiger worms.

Our worm farm was looking a little sad, it really needed a makeover, what did we need to add to make it a great habitat for our worms

Kaiako Nikki read the instructions on the worm farm to let us know what we needed to make a good home for our worms.  Paper, wet bedding, soil......  (lucky the food bag gives us great recyclable wool, perfect for worm farming).  We collected our resources, wet the bedding and lined our bins.

Then it was time to open the box of worms

Coco was ever so brave offering to help transfer them to their new home

"Ooh" Claudia gasped, she couldn't believe how wriggly and slimy they were

We then moved our Worm farm to a more shady spot and added a pot at the bottom to help the worms climb back up.

We will take turns to feed and care for our worm farm.  We have lots of food scraps each day and worms can eat all kind of things, like fruit and vegetables scraps and leaves from the garden.  Worms can eat strange things too, like cotton clothes, paper, dust and hair!.  Worms do not like citrus though and onions, garlic chilli and meat make them sick, so we will make sure we don't give them that. 

Having a worm farm also means that we can collect worm wee.  It makes excellent fertiliser that we can pour on our garden which will help our plants to grow.  We can collect worm poo too!  Worm poo is known as vermicast.  When we mix worm poo into our soil, it also helps our plants grow big and strong.