Celebrating Cultures at Knights Stream School

This term Knights Stream School has been learning about the Masskara festival held in Bacolod, Philippines. This festival includes a carnival and people dancing in parades wearing masks and colourful clothing. As we learnt more about this celebration, we found that many other countries around the world include masks as part of their celebrations, and they are significant to many peoples' cultures.

The children have been busy throughout the term planning, preparing and creating their masks. They were asked to consider what is important to them or their culture and include this in their design.

To celebrate our learning we held a cultural day where we dressed in clothing of significance to our own cultures alongside participating in our own Masskara Parade, where the tamariki proudly shared their amazing masks!

It was wonderful to see all of the tamariki dressed in their cultural dress or mufti clothing. We have a great range of cultures at Knights Stream School, which we are very proud of. Many of the tamariki were very excited to be able to share their culture and identity with their friends at Knights Stream School.

On top of this term’s learning we have been lucky enough to have formed a Student Cultural Committee. On the committee this year are Alyssa, Devi, Jeno, Mehdi, Ryan, Savreet, Sylvia, Vaughn and Zohra. These students came up with the idea of sharing their own or another culture with the school and prepared displays with information and an activity for the children to learn about. The whole school went to the rotations and learnt about the culture in Afghanistan, South Korea, China, India and Italy. We were very impressed with the quality of the information from this group and the way they engaged the tamariki with interactive activities.