🏭 Week 3: Human Impacts & Actions
Students analyse how human activities positively and negatively impact our waterways. Through cause-and-effect mapping and role-play, they identify realistic actions to improve awa health.
Focus Question
What are the causes of pollution in our awa, and what can we do to help?
Ngā Mahi - Week 3 Activities
1. Impact Analysis: Stormwater vs Wastewater (15 mins)
Activity: Explore common pollutants and how they enter our waterways through infrastructure like drains and runoff.
- Gallery Walk: Compare photos of drains, litter, and planting
- Learn: Stormwater vs Wastewater — where does the water go?
- Identify never-goes-down-the-drain items: soap, paint, oil
Stormwater Explained
2. Planning Solutions: Cause & Effect (25 mins)
Activity: In pairs, use the Cause -> Effect -> Action Organiser to map out 2-3 impact chains.
- Example: Soap in drain (Cause) -> Dead fish (Effect) -> Car wash on grass (Action)
- Link findings from Week 2 (pH/litter data) to justify actions
- Groups share their "strongest" action with the class
3. Voices of the Awa: Role-Play (20 mins)
Activity: Students take on roles as the Awa, a Native Fish, a Local Farmer, or a Kaitiaki to explore different perspectives on water health.
- Use Interview Prompts to guide the dialogue
- "The Awa says: 'I feel choked with silt today...'"
- Kaitiaki responds with a solution or action
💡 Differentiation Strategies
- Scaffolding: Provide pre-filled causes or effects for matching
- Support: Offer sentence stems: "If people ___, the awa ___, so we can ___."
- Extension: Research the path of stormwater from your school playground to the sea
Curriculum alignment
- Ecosystems — Knowledge: Human activity and technology impact the environment.
- Body Systems — Knowledge: Some animals, like fish, respire using gills, which take oxygen out of water.
📋 Teacher Planning Snapshot
🌊 Kaitiakitanga this week — Cause and effect is also a question of who bears it
This week the kaitiakitanga is responsibility. Every cause→effect chain has people at both ends. What this changes: when ākonga complete a chain, they add one more link — who benefits from the activity, and who lives with the effect downstream. That is the difference between an environmental fact and a kaitiaki judgement.
Unit-wide success criteria
Assess this week against its own criteria above. The unit-wide criteria live once on the unit overview — they are not repeated here, so nobody marks the week against the wrong list.
Differentiation & Inclusion
Scaffold support: A cause-and-effect strip with the effect supplied so ākonga work backwards to the cause. Extension: find a real local consent or council report about the awa.
ELL / ESOL: Impact vocabulary (sediment, runoff, discharge) taught against photographs of the actual awa before any reading.
Inclusion: This week can name harm caused by families' own farms or workplaces. Discuss practices and systems, never individual households.
If an awa is a tupuna, then harm to it is harm to a relative — which is why kaitiakitanga frames pollution as an obligation breached, not merely a standard exceeded. Note that a discharge can be entirely lawful and still be a breach in these terms. That tension is the week's real question, and it is not resolved by picking one framework.