Winning Letter in "The Press"

It is so exciting, we "won" the winning letter in "The  Press". We are sad though that we "won" through the sadness of others. Our teacher put it in a week ago.  She looked every day and then thought "Oh, well, they are not going to print it." Then on Friday, there it was.  She is so proud of us all.  She wanted to text all her friends at 5am in the morning, when she read it but had to wait until they were out of bed.

It was so nice to have it printed the day after the very sad day when the service was held for the miners.  We all had two minutes silence to remember them.  This is the page it was on and you can see the cartoon on one of our other Pike River Coal Mine blogs. 

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.