Paikea and the whale

Paikea and the whale

Last week, we have been working on a slideshow. The slideshow was all about a myth called "Paikea and the Whale". The story is about a chief called Uenuku who had seventy-one sons. One of the the sons had a slave mother, so he was not considered of noble birth like his brothers. One day, Uenuku told his workers to make a canoe and smooth it out of a tree trunk. After the canoe was made, Uenuku oiled and combed seventy of his sons hair. He did not oil the last brother, Ruatapu, because he was not born noble. Ruatapu got angry so he cut a hole in the canoe, and then filled it with wood chips. The next day, all of the brothers went off in the canoe. Once they were very far away from land, Ruatapu kicked away the wood chips with his foot. The canoe sank and everyone drowned except for Ruatapu and Paikea. Paikea held onto the whale Tangaroa had sent him, and went off to tell the others on land what had happened.

Ruatapu was angry that Paikea didn't drown, so he sent huge waves at Paikea. Paikea had already reached land by the time the waves got to him, so they backfired and drowned Ruatapu. We all did heaps of activities around this. Some of our activities included character descriptions, inferencing and summarising the whole story into a paragraph. Here is the slideshow below.