Best for
The closing 10 minutes of Lesson 9, after the class share.
Unit synthesis • Years 7–8 • Unit 10 Week 9
Unit Reflection
Nine lessons, from your own kitchen budget to a colonial famine to a warming ocean. This sheet asks what changed in how you think — and what you now believe scarcity actually is.
Free to teach tomorrow, adaptable to your rohe
The reflection is ready to print. Te Wānanga is useful when you want prompts tuned to your class's particular inquiries.
- Add prompts that name the topics your class actually investigated.
- Generate a shorter exit-ticket version for a compressed lesson.
- Save your adapted Unit 10 reflection in My Kete.
Kaiako planning snapshot
- Use length: 10 minutes.
- Grouping: Individual, silent.
- Prep: One per student. Have the whakataukī visible on the board.
- Teaching move: Let the last question be genuinely open. The unit's finding is contestable, and a student who argues against it well has understood it.
What this sheet already gives you
- A lesson-by-lesson recall grid
- A before-and-after belief prompt
- A synthesis sentence using unit vocabulary
- The closing whakataukī with a reading prompt
- An open question about what students would change
The before-and-after prompt is the most revealing. Students who write the same thing in both boxes have usually learned the vocabulary without changing the idea underneath it.
Ngā Whāinga Ako / Learning Intentions
- We are learning to synthesise nine lessons into a single explanation.
- We are learning to notice how our own thinking has changed.
- We are learning to connect a whakataukī to what we have studied.
Ngā Paearu Angitū / Success Criteria
- I can name what each part of the unit contributed to my understanding.
- I can state what I thought scarcity meant before, and what I think now.
- I can use at least three unit vocabulary words accurately in one sentence.
What each part of the unit gave you
| Lessons | The one thing I will remember |
|---|---|
| 1–2 — Scarcity, kai and kūmara innovation | |
| 3 — Rice and global trade | |
| 4 — The Irish Potato Famine | |
| 5 — Trade-offs and choices | |
| 6 — Climate change and kai | |
| 7–9 — My own inquiry |
Before and after
| Your answer | |
|---|---|
| At the start of this unit, I thought scarcity meant | |
| Now I think it means | |
| The thing that changed my mind was |
One sentence
Write one sentence that explains what this unit taught you about food scarcity. Use at least three of these words: scarcity, trade-off, opportunity cost, structural cause, interdependence, collective action.
The whakataukī
Hutia te rito o te harakeke, kei hea te kōmako e kō?
Pluck out the heart of the flax bush, and where will the bellbird sing?
This whakataukī is often used to speak of family and community as the source of sustenance and song. After nine lessons on kai, what do you think the “heart of the flax” stands for in a food system?
Last question
Across the whole class's posters, one pattern kept appearing: structural causes — power, access, climate — showed up behind every different challenge. If food scarcity is mostly about who controls access rather than how much food exists, what is the one thing you would change?