Sunday 7 May 2017

The Celebrations Group


Introducing the Celebrations group - Isla H, Issa, Beth, Jade, Elsa, Michaella, Jayce, Haylynn, Meela, Kees, Lachlan, Edward, Mason HC, Bella, Ronald and Nikhil!

We are interested in finding out about elements of the different cultures that are represented amongst us in LC2.  We recorded our questions and wonderings in a brainstorm and decided that we would like to organise and run a Cultural Day for LC2.



We decided that the first thing we needed to do was find out which ethnicities are represented in our common.  We thought a tally chart and a bar graph would be a good way to show the information.




We spent some time analysing our data.  We were interested to see that NZ Maori, British/Irish and Chinese all had 10 people and we were excited to see that we had such a large number of different ethnicities!

Then we thought about who we could ask for help and quickly realised that our families would be the perfect place to start!!  We needed to know how to send an email so Kerry ran a workshop to show us and together we wrote an email to all of our families asking for their help.

We were very excited to get some replies straight away!  Kerry showed some of us how to log into our gmail account and we replied to our families to say thank you for offering to help!





We are so fortunate to have locked in some workshops next week.  We will then be able to share some of the skills we learn next week with the rest of LC2 on Cultural Day.  This is what our project timeline looks like at the moment.



We know that we will need to do research to find out information about the things we are interested in - dance, music, food, art and the traditions of different cultures.  Kerry ran a workshop to show us how to retrieve information.  We learnt how to highlight the important facts and then make bullet pointed notes.


We have also explored how to research using the internet.  We thought about using keywords as well as questions and how adding the word 'children' or 'kids' into the address bar often leads to better results.  We found out that the results of your search are broken up into All, Images and Videos.

In preparation for our Irish dancing workshop next week we thought we would see if we could find out any information.  We were excited to see that we could watch a video that showed us how to do Irish Dancing......


We also found a performance called Riverdance.......


'It's kind of romantic.' Nikhil

'You'd need to do lots of practise.' Mason HC

'It's like a hummingbird.' Nikhil

'Their feet are super blurry.' Kees

'I think he is getting dizzy.' William

Nikhil then commented, 'Does it represent anything?  Like a story?'

Great question Nikhil? Nikhil shared with us that most Indian dances do tell a story.  So we googled Traditional Indian Dances and watched a few!  We talked about the differences that we noticed between Indian and Irish dancing - different costumes, style/pace of music, different moves......  We made a note to ask Michaella's Mum Emma if Irish dances tell a story when she comes in to lead her workshop on Wednesday.

We have got a very exciting week coming up with some great workshops coming up.  Watch this space!