The Treaty of Waitangi

We started off by reading a story about the Treaty of Waitangi. This story was a story written for year 6 students, so it was very hard for our year 4 and year 5 students. 

Here is a link to the story.

Miss Ashley gave us a printed out copy so we could annotate it (write all over it). 

The first step was to try our best to read it, and highlight any words or phrases we didn't understand. 

It looks something like this..

We also recorded our ideas on our word wall.

We did this for 4 days - each day a new part of the story. 

On the 4th day, we also read a second story about the Treaty. 

(Link to story here).

We found lots of our new words that we learnt from the first story, in the second story! It helped us to understand it. 

The next day, Miss Ashley had printed out ALL the new words we had learnt. 

(View the doc here to see what the words were). 

Miss Ashley put us into two groups and we had to go through all the words and try to remember what they meant. We remembered lots!

If we couldn't remember, we looked at the word wall for help...

Or went back to our writing books where we could find the words in the first story we read and see what they meant.

The next step was to try and put some of the words together and make a sentence.

Then we read the sentences aloud and made sure we knew what the new words meant.

Here are our sentences we came up with - 

(if the word is bolded, it means it was one of our new words).

The Iwi was suspicious that there was 2 versions.

The founding document is still significant and relevant.

The chiefs had a hui with the governor.

An income is money you get annually.

Pakeha/British subjects came to Aotearoa to hunt.

The government was dishonest and confiscated Maori land. Maoris protested. The government acknowledged they were unruly and gave them compensation decades later.

The British Empire colonised Aotearoa and took over governorship. They made Maoris give up their sovereignty.

The chiefs of the Iwis had a debate and made an agreement with the governor.

Missionaries came to Aotearoa in casual clothes to teach Pakeha about God decades ago.

We also came up with a quick summary of the Treaty.

Every year on the 6th of Feb we celebrate the Treaty of Waitangi. This national holidays acknowledges when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed.

The Treaty of Waitangi is NZ’s founding document. It was written to create peace between the  Pakeha and the Maori.

It was written by William Hobson and translated by Henry Williams and his son Edward. It was translated overnight between the 5th and 6th of Feb. On the 6th of Feb, over 40 Maori chiefs signed the Maori version of the Treaty. Copies were sent around NZ and more than 500 chiefs signed the copies.

There was 2 versions - an English one and a Maori one. In the English version, Maori gave up their sovereignty and power of land/animals/waters etc. In the Maori version, they kept their mana and tino rangatiratanga.

A few decades later, wars broke out between Pakeha’s and Maori’s and between Maori’s (intertribal warfare). This led to lots of land being confiscated. Maori’s began protesting that the treaty was not being honoured. The Waitangi Tribunal was set up to allow Maori to lay claim and receive compensation and an apology for what had happened to them.

The Treaty of Waitangi is still relevant and significant till this day. Our country was founded on a agreement of partnership and that is how it should be run for the future.