E Ho'ohuli Ka Lima i Lalo (Turn The Hands Down)!

Funded Dec 30, 2013

Mahalo nui (Thank you very much) for supporting our classroom project, "E Ho'ohuli Ka Lima i Lalo." With your generous donations, we were able to buy tools for our growing garden. The kids were very excited once all of our tools started arriving at school. It felt like Christmas for all of us. We got to open each and every box to see the beautiful tools that were the right size for the little kids. Once everything arrived, we got to actually learn about the rules and how to handle the tools before using them. We also learned the Hawaiian words for the tools and the simple Hawaiian phrases we used with the tools.

Every Wednesday all of the students got to use the tools to rake the leaves or rubbish, remove the weeds, and transport the rubbish to our mulch area. We also got a chance to use the shovels and hoes to plant 'ulu (breadfruit) and papaia (papaya) trees to our growing garden. We even got to harvest a lot of our 'uala (sweet potato) and kalo (taro) with our tools. Without these tools, we wouldn't have been able to continue our hard work in our garden.

These tools helped encourage the children's excitement and eagerness to get outside in the garden. The kinds of activities and lessons we did with the plants from our garden definitely enhanced the children's learning. The best part of this entire project was showing the kids that hard work and taking care of the land and plants can result in the land taking care of us by providing us with food to eat. We got to taste our 'uala, kalo, and papaia. All of them were very tasty and continue to flourish in our garden. Mahalo again and we truly appreciate everyone's kindness and generosity!!!”

With gratitude,

Mrs. Kumu Kaunaʻoa