We went to Shantytown so we could learn about history and migration.
I learned what school was like (if your work was not up to standard you had to wear a hat with DUNCE written on it!).

We found out about Kehu and Brunner's journey to explore the West Coast (I had been learning about them in reading) and how people came to the West Coast to get the coal, despite Brunner's judge of the land (sandflies,dense bush, rain). After, we split into four groups and each built a raft out of manuka wood, paper, flax and sellotape, and put them in a trough to see if a paua shell and a kiwi would stay on the raft!

Morning tea was fun because of the stilts. I couldn't do more than a couple of steps for astart, but Pera showed me how to put my arms in front of the of the stilts and I got the hang of it.

Later we turned into gold miners (with our groups) and walked to Infants Creek on the manuka track with a tarp hanging on a spade with the group's (my group=5 members) lunch boxes, water bottles, gold pans, a little spade and a blanket! When we were there we claimed a one square metre of ground (our claim) built a shelter with the tarp, blanket, and ropes, and shovelled the top of the sand/gravel on our claim. Then we started the gold panning! We shovelled the gravelly sand out of the cleared claim into our gold pans, dipped them into the creek to carefully remove the gravel, gave it a wiggle, repeated it until we had almost no gravel in the pans and looked closely for tiny golden glimmers. We only got a few flakes of gold, and some didn't get any at all, but it was still my favourite part of the day.

Written by Tahryn Amies