Celebrating Reading and Bee-Bop-a-Lula

There are just so many things to celebrate at this time of year and here are a few of them:

  1. Winning the Bee-bop-a-Lula Award
    2. Our Award recipients: Maisey, Winter and Ethan! CONGRATULATIONS and well done for showing those values and effort all through the year!3. HandsUp4Kids students with their certificates and Beryl – Congratulations on your hard work every week with Beryl and for the improvement in your reading this year. Keep it up!! 🙂

And well done to EVERYBODY for being such a wonderful group of students! You can all be very proud of your efforts and for the way you’ve worked as a team and made Room 6 such a great class for 2022!!
Mrs Veary

INFORMATION ON CHINESE NEW YEAR – SYMBOLS AND EVERYTHING

INFORMATION ON CHINESE NEW YEAR – everything you need to know about Chinese New Year.  Look in your booklet to see what you need to find out then click on the headings on the right-hand side menu of this website.  Facts and videos…

This PDF also tells you more about how people prepare for and celebrate Chinese New Year.  You may need these facts to answer your workbook.CHINESE NEW YEAR PREPARATIONS

Nyepi

NYEPI (Indonesia – Bali New Year)

(Day of Silence)

New Year in Bali is called Nyepi.  (As you learn about this New Year and its traditions and rituals, think about how it is different and what might be the same as our New Years Day in Australia which we looked at yesterday) 🙂

This holiday is the Balinese New Year, and is a day of total silence throughout the island. There are no activities to disturb Nyepi.

• No activity is allowed anywhere (no-one goes to work)

• People have to stay in their houses

• no traffic at all is allowed on the roads (cars or people)

• No lights or electricity are used

• no fire may be lit for 24 hours.

• Great purification and sacrificial rites are held the day before so as to get rid of evil spirits from every corner of the island (ogah ogah are made, paraded then burned)

This is all to make sure that the world is clean and fresh and everything starts new again for the New Year.

The day after Nyepi, Hindus gather to forgive each other and start the new year well with festivities.

This video shows the Ogah Ogah being paraded down the streets, with Indonesian music and instruments being played.  They are made from bamboo and paper and only represent evil which they wish to destroy to start the new year with only good for all mankind.

You can read more about this interesting New Year and its rituals here NYEPI RITUALS

After you have read the information on this page and in the link above, answer the questions on your sheet about NYEPI. Then you can draw your own Ogah Ogah!

All About Phar Lap

You are probably wondering just why Phar Lap (a horse) became so popular with Australians…

  • Who was Phar Lap?
  • What made him so special as a racehorse?
  • Try to explain just why Australians loved him so much? (It was more than just watching a racehorse?)

You can find some of that information in your booklet, but let’s also have a look at the information in THE MUSEUMS VICTORIA site.

or in this video clip PHAR LAP – A NATIONAL TREASURE.[see Phar Lap’s Hide clip]

Now, can you explain why Phar Lap was so important to the nation at that time?

Just as a treat, here is a video clip (from the movie, “Phar Lap”) of Phar Lap and Jimmy Pike winning the Melbourne Cup in 1930.  NATIONAL FILM AND SOUND ARCHIVE AUSTRALIA 

MAKERSPACE – JAPANESE CHILDREN’S DAY – CRAFTS

You worked really well at all the different activities on offer on Friday. Origami is a very traditional Japanese craft and your Samurai helmets looked great. The carp flags to fly at your house to show how many boys are in your family on Kodomohi looked great. The dolls also looked very colourful. Some people still have to finish some of their crafts, but here you can see how good they looked. Well done, people! Mrs Veary 🙂

Mark to Visit Again

This photo will remind you of the very interesting things Mark Bonshore told us when he visited our class a couple of weeks ago.
img_0266-smallHe showed us a map of the Noongar language groups in the South West and explained how there were many different language groups within that too.

He also talked about the Noongar seasons and how people used plants instead of a calendar to tell them when to move to the coast or away from the coast to the woodland areas, and what food would be available.  Indigenous life revolved around the environment and the people lived in close relationship with the environment.  They had to live sustainably (making sure nothing was used up or ran out in the future) and it was really important to keep the balance and follow the order of the cycle of the seasons.

Mark told us stories about the special creatures which live in the South West:

  • the bream that only live in that particular waterway;
  • the mullet who go temporarily blind as they leave the river to re-enter the sea – so the people were able to spear them easily;
  • the purple python (Dreamtime Wagul) around Albany at the time of European settlement, which is now extinct;
  • when the Sheoak Tree flowers, it is time to hunt kangaroos.  The kangaroos eat the flowers from the She-Oak Tree (which are poisonous if eaten by people), but the kangaroos store the special medicines from the flowers in the fat along their backs, so by hunting the kangaroo, people could eat the medicine from the tree safely too.
  • The Ngari (Salmon) run which was the size of the oval from Perth to Esperance; and
  • how indigenous people used to build fish traps to catch fish.

We could have listened to his stories all day, but now we have the chance to hear from him again.  Mark will be coming to share his culture and stories with us again on Tuesday at 12.10p.m.  😎