Oh the things we will build together

Today as we were gardening, I (Ollie) decided to explore the neighbours rubbish pile. I climbed the fence while mum was gardening to see what treasures I could find and use.

I asked mum “what does - One man’s trash, is another mans treasure” mean. Mum said , one person may think something is trash or rubbish , where another person, may see treasure rather than trash and say, “ hey I could use that to make or create something”.

So, this is what I did. I found a few pieces of trash – left over building material and carried it home over the fence. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the treasure I found, but I was keen on doing something with it.

Hunter jumped the fence also and found two chairs that were on the rubbish pile, both chairs were still ok to use. Mum made sure they were safe with no rusty nails.

Hunter and I decided to make a whanau/family hut out of the treasure we found. We had so much fun. I did lots of pruning and clearing of our climbing tree and walking track , to make it easier to use and walk around. Hunter placed the recycled timber we got from next door around our tree to create our own hut. We then used the cut off small soft branches I pruned to create a carpet for our hut. This worked well as we didn’t even need to wear shoes in our hut. Before it was prickly from all the pine needles. We even used the wool we got out of our My food bag , which created a mat at the front door of our hut. We used a recycled piece of plastic for the roof of our hut.

Mum said she would create a sign whilst we built the hut. We all decided it was a family hut, so mum did the artwork and wrote “whanau hut”, whanau means family. I told mum that I could stare at her artwork all day, I thought it was that good.

As the sun was going down, we swept and tidied up our hut, so it looked nice. We invited dad out to have a look. He thought it was really good.

In the morning we went with dad to the river to do our treasure hunt Pip sent us. We didn’t find a squirrel, butterfly, or caterpillar, because it’s not the right season and squirrels live in Canada.

We did find all the other things. Thanks Pip!

At the river we made a spear each, we used a knife to cut and shape the willow to create our spears. Mum made us pretend to be warriors guarding our hut and do a pūkana with our spears. We are going to take our spears to the West Coast when we go white baiting. I hope we can spear a flounder.