Maori Wood Toys

This term we have been making small projects in Wood for Matariki. We first made a small board game called Mu Torere. Then next we made a spinner that when we finally got going made a little noise through the holes that we made in the wood. The only thing about this toy that I didn't like was the way the string cut into our fingers. We fixed this by getting two small dowels and putting them in the string instead of our fingers. This was just as effective as using our fingers to spin it.

The project that we are working on now is a bullroarer. The first that we needed to do was shape the wood. We used a sanding belt to shape the top into a circle shape and then again to make the straight edges on the end. We then drilled a hole in the top about two inches from the top of the wood. After we finished that we got a piece of string and poked it through the hole and then tied the two ends together. The last thing we did was tie a block of wood to the end of the string that wasn't attached to the wood and we made that into a handle so that, like the last project, the string wouldn't cut into our fingers