Identity - Pukerua Bay

In Term 4 we looked at the origin of some street names in Pukerua Bay. There is some great information about the history of Pukerua Bay and the origin of street names on the Porirua City Library site which I used in my initial research.

As I wanted the students to learn some research skills themselves, I got them to look up two maori words each using the online Maori Language Dictionary. They had to find the meaning of the word and use it in a sentence. Some of these words were reasonably straightforward like rawhiti and teihana. Although some teaching was still needed to help the students navigate the dictionary.

Some words like kura have multiple meanings. This was a challenge. How do you decide what is the right meaning? We chose two definitions (school and scarlet) and left the final decision to our walk around the streets of Pukerua Bay.

On a beautiful sunny afternoon we headed off on an adventure. First stop was outside the school gates. We'd learnt that rawhiti means 'facing the east' or 'facing where the sun rises'. Looking at this photo taken in the middle of winter we could see that Rawhiti Road does indeed face the sunrise.

Once we knew where east was, we could understand how that the sun sets on the western hills behind Raroa Place. Perhaps this is why this street is named after 'long day'?

Wairaka Road was easy as we had previously studied the story of Hau and Wairaka. Haunui Place and Haunui Road were a little more tricky as the students weren't used to hearing Wairaka's husband called by his longer name.

When we got to Te Kura road it was obvious this was named for being near the school, rather than for being a 'scarlet' road.

And although we didn't go down to the railway station we could see how Teihana Road West would once have joined with Teihana Road East which heads down to the station.
Back at school we traced our journey.

This was a great chance to reinforce our learning about directions and to practise reading maps. The students then drew pictures representing the different streets. Here is our visual map of Pukerua Bay.