Letter to Mr Burt

                                                                                          Mr Burt

                                                                                          Pt England School

                                                                                          Auckland

                                                                                          New Zealand

Zaeeda

Pt England School

Auckland

New Zealand

TODAY’S DATE 7/03/2017

Dear Mr Burt,

We need to plant some flax/harakeke bushes because it will help our native birds and rare birds by giving them shelter and a huge amount of food to eat and planting harakeke bushes will attract special snails that are rare. Flax snails, a rare land snail living only in the Far North, often shelter under flax bushes These snails don’t eat any of the flax, but they sometimes munch on fallen leaves from harkeke.

We should also plant  harakeke bushes because in the twentieth century we didn't care about the harakeke and we had not a lot left but some of the growers kept their special flax and  over the years they grew more flax  so now have flax and we should also plant harakeke so we will have harkeke for century's and century's.

Mr Burt, we should plant more harakeke bushes because we can use it for medication it can heal infections and colds harkeke can also become hand creams. We could also use the harakeke to weave things like baskets and hats and fans we could start a club at school and Whea saf could teach us to weave in tero maori.

Flax is the most useful plant to maori kind they use harakeke for cloaks, fishing, nets, sails, masts and  ropes for fishing. Maori speak of harakeke as a whanau  because the grandparents and great grandparents are all on the outside and the parent and uncles and anuties are in  the middle and then the babies are growing on the inside that's why it's important to cut the outside flax instead of the inside and in the middle because if you take the inside you're taking the babies when the grandparents are gone the babies aren’t there to grow.

There are  4 steps to preparing the harakeke for  weaving first we have to cut the harakeke at the base of the tupuna. next we have to split the blades of the harakeke. after that you have sorted the diffrent stips of harakeke  and bundled them together. Finally we scrape the blades of the harkeke to make it easier to weave.

We are thinking of  planting harakeke bushes in these parts of the the school