Aroha Kupu

Words open up your world and in Ruma Kokako we want to become logophiles (lovers of words) or in Maori, aroha kupu.

We are spending time exploring words and how powerful they can be for unlocking meaning when reading and creating deep meaning when writing.


We are doing a number of activities to build our vocabulary understanding. These have included:

• Not all synonyms are equal - we have been ordering synonyms by their intensity.
• We have found positive and negative connotations with different synonyms. 
• In English we use the same word for different things. We explored different contexts for the same word. 
• All words can be put into groups such as adjectives, adverbs, nouns and verbs. We have been grouping words and using the correct terms to identify them.
• We can change words by just adding something to the front or end of them. We identified different prefixes and suffixes that change a word's meaning.
• Sometimes we a choose a simple word when a much better one is available. We used an emotion word wheel to identify various options for different situations involving fear

Here are a few examples of the students' work: