We're excited for our second, annual Cultural Celebrations Week!

This year our Cultural Celebrations Week will take place in the first week of Term 2.

Our school-wide concept for Term 1 and Term 2 is 'Turangawaewae - This Land of Plenty'. The key understandings we are wanting to develop with our learners are:

• Earth provides all the resources required to sustain life, except energy from the Sun.
• We are kaitiaki of our land and all it provides for us.
• People have different ideas about how resources should be controlled, used and protected.

To tie in with this our Cultural Celebrations Week will have a very strong tie to food! Which we all know is such an important part of many cultures! 

Last year so many of our wonderful learners bought a plate of food to share on the Friday that we could have opened a restaurant for the day! 

This year we'd like to try a different approach - an International Food Court in our hall! 

We'd love to hear from whānau who would like to take a key role in organising this. The vision so far is that we would connect families who want to celebrate different types of cuisines, or regions of the world, with each other and give them creative license to set up a market stall in the gym with food, information and more! Our learners will have an opportunity to explore the market and sample some food during the day. 

At this stage, we'd love to connect with people who are really keen to help take this on as a bit of a project and coordinate with other parents and family members keen to be involved. If this sounds like you please email Lara - lara@kawarau.school.nz

The other exciting thing that will happen during this week is an opportunity to come together and talk about how different cultures are valued and represented in our school. We have a number of families joining us from overseas and we would love to establish some groups of people who may be able to assist them with language barriers, settling into the area and more. We'd also love to hear your perspectives on how you see your child's culture celebrated all year round at our school. We'll send out more information on this next week but please pencil this into your diaries if you are interested in being involved. 

If you have any other awesome ideas for us please do get in touch! 

Some wonderful conversations to have as a family, and ones that we will be having in our classes are...

* What is culture? 

* What is your culture as a family? 

Here's some photos from last year Friday Celebration Day!