Students will engage with this resource to build understanding of Aotearoa New Zealand's ecosystems, biodiversity, and the role of kaitiakitanga in environmental stewardship.

Ngā Paearu Angitū — Success Criteria

✅ Students can explain key concepts from this resource using their own words.
✅ Students can connect the content to real-world environmental contexts in Aotearoa.

Differentiation & Inclusion

Scaffold support: Provide sentence starters, word banks, or graphic organisers to scaffold access for students who need it. Offer entry-level and extension tasks to address a range of readiness levels.

ELL / ESOL: Pre-teach key vocabulary and provide bilingual glossaries where available. Allow students to respond in their home language first.

Inclusion: Use accessible formats. Neurodiverse learners benefit from chunked instructions and choice in how they demonstrate understanding.

Prior knowledge: Best used after the relevant lesson sequence. No specialist prior knowledge required for entry-level engagement.

Curriculum alignment

Ecosystems — Practices: Constructing models of species interactions using food webs, nutrient cycles, or habitat maps to explain the interconnected nature of ecosystems
Ecosystems — Knowledge: Ecosystems can usually regenerate naturally, and humans can support this through conservation and restoration.
Ecosystems — Knowledge: Indigenous knowledge systems, such as mātauranga Māori, are often founded on long-term observations of environmental patterns. For example, ngā tohu o te taiao can be used to …
Ecosystems — Knowledge: Marama Muru-Lanning (Contemporary) explores mātauranga Māori as environmental knowledge, linking Indigenous perspectives to ecological science.
Ecosystems — Practices: Interpreting data (e.g. graphs, maps) to evaluate how human activity (e.g. agriculture, resource extraction) influences ecosystem stability and biodiversity