Information transfer
Once the students know some whakapapa-related vocabulary, give them a diagram of a three-generation family tree without any names on it (see resource sheet 1.6). As you read out a passage about the family tree, get the students to fill in who’s who on their copy, working in groups. You could say things like:
| Maori vocabulary | English translation |
|---|---|
| Ko ... te māmā. | The mother is ... |
| Ko ... te pāpā. | The father is ... |
| Ko ... te kuia. | The grandmother is ... |
| Ko ... te koroua. | The grandfather is ... |
| Ko ... rātou ko ..., ko ... ngā tamariki a ... | ..., ..., and ... are the children of ... |
| Tokorua ngā tamariki a ... | ... has two children. |
| Ko ... te mātāmua/pōtiki a ... | ... is the eldest/youngest child of ... |
This is an information transfer task. You are asking the students to put spoken text into another form (words written on a diagram). Conversely, your students could transpose a picture of a family tree into spoken or written text. This kind of task encourages deep processing of information.
As the students become more confident with the language structures, they could begin to explain their own whakapapa to the class, with their classmates recording the names of the people involved. At levels 1 and 2, keep family trees to three generations.