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Draft curriculum content

This page is based on the draft Year 2 content for Social Sciences, which is currently open for feedback. Schools are not required to implement changes until the consultation process is confirmed.

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Consultation for Year 0 to 10 draft curriculum content

The Social Sciences help students understand how people live together, make decisions, and shape communities so they can participate thoughtfully in society. In Years 0 to 3, students build foundational knowledge and start to explore important concepts, such as identity, family, and community.

Teaching is structured around 4 strands that focus on key areas of learning. In Year 2, these include:

  • History: migration and how ships and seafarers have navigated to New Zealand; Stone Age people and how we know about them
  • Civics and Society: group rules, routines, and social organisation
  • Geography: settlements, weather features, and weather hazards
  • Economic Activity: the use of money to address needs and wants.

History#

Ideas to help at home

With your child, you could:

  • talk about how different people travelled before cars and planes, including walking, sea travel, ways of navigating, and the technology they used
  • talk about how your family travelled here, where your family came from, and why they came
  • discuss how we know about things that happened before people wrote stories down, for example, through waiata, mōteatea, pūrākau, artworks, and archaeology
  • play games in the sandpit by burying an artefact for them to find and see if they can figure out what it represents
  • talk about prehistory, the time before people could write things down, and the different ways we can learn about it
  • use words like navigator, navigation, seafarer, voyage, exploration.

What the teacher will focus on#

The teacher will focus on the concept of migration and how ships and seafarers navigated their way to New Zealand. They will also focus on the Stone Age as an example of global history. For example, by the end of the year, your child may be able to:

  • explain how people first learned to float and sail, and how this has changed over time
  • retell stories of famous seafarers, including Kupe, Abel Tasman, Captain Cook, and Tupaia
  • explain when and how Polynesian people discovered New Zealand and what we can learn from Māori oral traditions
  • understand the concept of prehistory – the time before people could write down stories or facts
  • use terms like BC and AD, BCE and CE, Stone Age to describe long periods of time
  • share information about how the first humans evolved in Africa during the Stone Age and migrated around the globe over thousands of years
  • identify some ways we can learn about Stone Age people, for example, evidence from tools, pottery, jewellery, and fossil remains.

Civics and Society#

Ideas to help at home

With your child, you could:

  • talk about roles, rules, and routines at home and how they help everyone to work well together
  • talk about roles, rules, and routines in other groups your child is part of, including sports, religious, ethnic or friendship groups
  • talk with your child about how every cultural group will have their own practices. These are the group’s traditions, rules, and ways of being. An example of this is how tikanga and kawa are applied in te ao Māori.

What the teacher will focus on#

The teacher will focus on group rules, routines, and social organisation. For example, by the end of the year, your child may be able to:

  • describe roles, rules, and routines in a familiar context, such as at school, and explain how these practices help people in the group work well together
  • explain the importance of fairness and why it’s important to have rules and routines
  • talk about how good relationships help groups of people work well together
  • identify some ways that people can lead groups and opportunities for children to help lead community activities
  • understand that people show their group identity and sense of belonging through their cultural practices, for example, language, greetings, festivals, and religion
  • compare the cultural practices of different groups of people.

Geography#

Ideas to help at home

With your child, you could:

  • use a paper or digital map to locate the islands and main bodies of water in New Zealand, and find where you live
  • use a map to find Te Whanganui-a-tara | Wellington, then locate other capital cities in countries your child already knows about through family, sport, or their favourite TV shows
  • create a simple weather chart for a week or a month, using it to record each day's weather with symbols, and talk about how different it might look in each season
  • use sandpit play with water as an opportunity to explore how the flow of water affects the landscape.

What the teacher will focus on#

The teacher will focus on the features of different kinds of settlements and weather features, as well as local weather hazards. For example, by the end of the year, your child may be able to:

  • explain that a settlement is a place where people live and have access to services, for example, shops, marae, places of worship
  • use aerial photographs to identify and compare the features of different types of settlements, for example, rural villages with limited services, cities with lots of services
  • define what a capital city is and use a map to locate capital cities around the world, including Te Whanganui-a-Tara | Wellington
  • use a map to identify the islands and bodies of water that surround New Zealand
  • use weather words and the season names to describe how the weather changes throughout the year
  • explain some basic weather processes, for example, how rainwater moves across the land or into the ground, and hazards, such as flooding, snow, and ice.

Economic Activity#

Ideas to help at home

With your child, you could:

  • make a shopping list by drawing or writing five things that you need and five things that you want, then swap lists and discuss what you have both chosen
  • use a supermarket catalogue or website to do a pretend grocery shop with a $100 budget, then add another $20, $50, or $100 and see what you would need to buy to get your household through the week
  • take your child shopping and give them coins and notes to pay for their purchases
  • talk about the sorts of things they wanted in the past and how this has changed as they got older.

What the teacher will focus on#

The teacher will focus on how people use money to address their needs and wants. For example, by the end of the year, your child may be able to:

  • recognise that notes and coins can be combined to reach the value required to purchase goods and services, for example, to buy an ice cream
  • recognise that money is limited and people have to choose what to spend their money on
  • understand the difference between a person’s:
    • needs, things that are essential for survival, like food and shelter
    • wants, things a person may desire
  • recognise that what people want can change over time and can be different for each person, for example, entertainment preferences.