Sunday 10 April 2016

Our Tihiotonga Walk and Picnic Lunch

The Year One classes enjoyed our walk around our school locality last Friday and our yummy hot dog lunch afterwards! This walk enabled us to have first hand experience of the places in our school Pepeha and will enhance our learning about our local Maori history. We walked down to the Utuhina stream and up towards  Tihiotonga. We saw the peak in the south that our school is named after and we looked down the hill to see the view of Lake Rotorua and Mokoia Island. We talked about Hinemoa and Tutanekai who moved from Mokoia Island to Tihiotonga to live and used the Utuhina as a source of water and food. We also stopped to look at our school sign and talked about the meaning of  the name on the sign; Te Kura o Tihiotonga. 
Whaea Callie and Whaea Sheena were really proud of Room 8 for being so awesome on our walk and we would like to thank all the parents who gave up their time to come with us. We really appreciated you being there and hope you enjoyed your time with us. We will continue learning about our school Pepeha and our local history through out the year as this valuable learning connects us to each other, our local history and our local environment.