Hawaiian Language and Hula
As an introduction to Hawaiian culture, we explored the Hawaiian alphabet and hula dance.
Hawaiians have always had their own language, but they didn’t have a written alphabet until American’s arrived in the 19th century. These American’s matched the sounds of the Hawaiian language to letters in the Latin alphabet to create an alphabet that only has 13 letters. This includes the ‘Okina or glottal stop that looks like an apostrophe and makes the difference in Hawai’i vs Hawaii.
We used 12 loose letters from the Hawaiian alphabet to match to a poster of the English alphabet to find out which sounds are and are not in their language. We used our magnetic foam letters, but you could also print and cut out the image above. This game uses matching skills and also helps with recognizing letter forms.
Since they didn’t have a written language, they used other ways to tell stories, such as through pictures, song, or dance. After reviewing the alphabet, we learned some Hawaiian words and hula.
We learned a hula dance with this video :
(the hula dance is at min 3:00 -5:14)
We learned some Hawaiian words with this song:
(Although I thought “Keiki Hula” was cute, my 4 yo daughter thought this song was a little bit boring).
After learning the alphabet and watching these videos, we used Mahalo and aloha throughout the day. I also printed the Hawaiian alphabet for my daughter’s reference board. We explored a few more hula tutorial videos and we used the dance moves to dance to clips from the Moana video the rest of the week. Aloha!
Additional activities:
We had learned about volcanoes in another study, so we also talked about how the Hawaiian islands were formed from volcanoes spewing molten lava. We made “lava” lollipops that start out as a super hot liquid and then cool to a solid “rock”. We used this recipe to make the candy and then poured it over some bamboo stakes that we had for the handles.
We also did some dramatic play and pretended we were surfing on some extra cardboard we had. Polynesians are credited with being the first surfers and surfing is still a big part of Hawaiian culture.