Pike River Coal MIne

Every day we have a look at the newspaper.  We always look at the cartoon.  To understand it we have to use our prior knowledge and think about what the author wants us to think or understand. We think of the connections we can make with it so that it means something to us.  Sometimes it is quite hard to know especailly if we have not been watching the news, because the cartoon is always about something that has happened, in the news.

We have been reading about the Pike River Coal Mine and the terrrible disaster.  We had been watching, listening and hoping.  Today there was a cartoon, which we all understood.  It needed only one word in it.  We understand from the cartoon that like us the author is thinking about the coals miners and their families and how much they want their loved ones bodies back with them.  We looked closely at the machine and at the arum lily, which is the kind of flower people often give and have at funerals.  We are very sad, we are sad for all the families and friends.

We talked about how people feel empathy with others and how we are all connected to these people because they could be our brothers, our dads, our uncles or our friends, how many of us have visited Greymouth and many of us know people there.  We talked about how we are all New Zealanders together and what this means to us in times like this. We all made a connection with this terrible disaster. We are storing these memories in our brains, it is now part of our history too,  and we will remember in the years to come about this sad time.