Te Taha wai

    Te Tehawai Marae

  

Marae is said to be tapu meaning sacred. It started when you step foot through the waharoa. They do the call or karanga and that was the call of  welcome to their marae,  haere mai e nga manuhiri. When they do a karanga  we the manuhiri walked forward in a slow pace. When we got to the Marae’s entrance we had to take off our shoes. We got inside the marae and they (whaea) said a couple of things. After that we had to answer with a song, we sang Tu turi mai nga iwi and we did it with actions to the tangata whenua.

The next thing was that we had to either shake hands or do a hongi so I did a hongi.  Then we had to wash our hands before we had to eat. We ate one cookie and drank a cup of water. Later on when everyone finished,  Room five had to go to the other room while we stayed and weaved a kite. it was really fun. It had three squares on one side and two next to it, if you turned it over there were two squares and next to that was three squares it looks amazing.

When we finished we had to do a dance and the thing I liked best about the dance was the chorus. After that, we went to the other room and room 5 came to where we ate. What we did at the next room was we had to get a picture and drew patterns in it that I think was special. After that the boys did a haka. I liked the part when we did the dance because it was a nice dance to go with the song.  

By: Ferah