Te Wiki o Te Reo
Te Wiki o Te Reo
Te Wiki o Te Reo • News • Forest View High School
Celebrating Te Wiki o te reo Māori 2021
The theme was simply 'Kia Kaha te Reo Māori’ following on from the success of the last two years. ‘Kia Kaha’ is well known in New Zealand English with its correct Māori meaning of ‘be strong’. We often talk about languages as if they are people – talking about language health, strength and revitalisation.
So when we say ‘Kia Kaha te Reo Māori’ we’re saying - ‘Let’s make the Māori language strong'.
“Strength for an endangered language comes from its status, people being aware of how to support revitalisation, people acquiring and using it and from the language having the right words and terms to be used well for any purpose."
Every New Zealander can help strengthen our language. The goal is to have one million people speaking te reo by 2040.
Regardless of the restrictions put in place due to covid level 2, we still managed to run activities and celebrate our national tāonga, as a school whānau. We opened the week with a virtual school assembly online, which was a great success seeing it was our first time doing this. We joined others across the country and observed the Māori Language movement at 12pm on Tuesday by singing a hīmene and ending with a whakatauki, in different spaces throughout the school.
This year we celebrated our staff who are of Māori descent and displayed their Pēpeha in our reception area so that our students could make connections through their whakapapa. We had a range of fun activities that ran the duration of the week such as our ‘Kei hea rā a Carmen Sandiago i te ao’, a throwback to the 90’s where students had to solve clues in te Reo, Rāranga with Whaea Julie, Māorioke, Quizzes. Arataki Kahoot, Ki o rahi and many lunchtime activities. Our mufti day was our way of supporting our community by donating to our local Foodbank in our Kai Kōhā. Our sincere thanks goes to our families for supporting this venture in such trying times. Our staff were heavily involved too, learning a new waiata to add to their compilation of waiata, learning actions to help them learn the days of the week, challenging themselves in a game to practice kupu (words) for left and right and adding to their list of kupu to answer “Kei te pēhea te koe?’.
Our wonderful Food in Schools team ended our week with a delicious oven cooked hāngi for us all. Thank you to Mr Zhou for his donation of fry bread to accompany our hāngi.
All in all, it was a fantastic week and it was awesome to see both young and old getting involved and giving it a go. He waka eke noa!
