Intermediate Exploration (Y7-8)

Health and Physical Education Phase 3 — Health Education

"Major life changes like moving or starting at a new school can affect emotions and behaviour in ways people do not always expect, and while strategies like planning, talking, and self-care can help, learning to adjust often takes time and support."

"Developing skills such as emotional regulation, self-awareness, planning, and help-seeking, to manage change and cognitive development during adolescence"

"Resilience does not always look like 'bouncing back'. It can involve feeling stuck for a time, needing support from others, or taking time to recover before moving forward."

Lesson–Curriculum Map

• Major life changes → the whole sequence (framing): Year 7 is itself a transition — new teachers, new expectations, new social configurations, new demands on self-management. The curriculum names this explicitly: "starting at a new school can affect emotions and behaviour in ways people do not always expect", and that is happening to students in this room right now. This starter pack does not treat that as background context; it makes it the pedagogical starting point. Students who know the curriculum names their experience are more likely to engage authentically with the norms-setting and planning activities.
• Emotional regulation + planning + help-seeking → Lesson 2 (Navigating Identity) and Lesson 5 (Community Leadership): This statement becomes concrete where students write about themselves and about what comes next. Lesson 2's identity tree asks who they are becoming as a Year 7 learner; Lesson 5's transition goals ask what they will need and who they will ask. Naming the support before it is needed is help-seeking practised as a skill rather than admitted as a weakness. The curriculum frames this as a developmental competency to be explicitly taught, and those two portfolio sections are where it is taught. If you run the optional Pūrākau Timeline first, its challenge-point task rehearses the same move.
• Resilience as needing support, not just bouncing back → Lesson 1 (Tuakana-Teina) and Lesson 4 (Collaborative Inquiry): The curriculum's framing of resilience is deliberate — feeling stuck and needing others is a legitimate form of resilience. Lesson 1 builds the tuakana-teina relationship that makes asking normal rather than shameful, and Lesson 4's waka roles give every student a defined way to contribute and to hand work on. Together they answer the honest version of the question: not "what do strong people do?" but "what does our class need in place so that when someone is stuck, they can ask for and receive help?"

Ngā Aromatawai ā-Kōpura — Formative (In-Week Checkpoints)

The first two checkpoints belong to the optional launch activities. The five lessons carry their own exit verification, and each one closes a numbered section of the Leadership Portfolio — that is where the formative record of the sequence itself lives.

• Whānau Web Debrief (optional launch activity 1): After Activity 1, each student names aloud or writes one specific personal commitment to the class — not a general value ("be kind") but a concrete behaviour ("I will let someone finish their sentence before I respond"). Signals: can students translate group brainstorm into individual accountability? Students who struggle to be specific need scaffolding on what "collaborative behaviour" looks like in practice.
• Timeline Challenge Points Check (optional launch activity 2): After Activity 2, teacher reviews each student's timeline to confirm: (a) at least one challenge point is identified, and (b) a concrete response strategy or support person is named — not "I'll try harder" but "I'll ask my form teacher / I'll use the planning checklist." Signals self-awareness and help-seeking readiness. Students with no challenge points or generic responses need a brief 1:1 conversation, not a correction.
• Week-End Reflection Card: Students complete two sentences: "This week I found it easy to ___" and "This week I found it harder to ___ and what I did or need is ___." This normalises the second sentence — needing support is built into the prompt. Teacher reads these before the following Monday. Signals: can students name a genuine struggle? This is diagnostic data, not a grade.

Te Whakamātautau — Summative: the Leadership Portfolio

The Y7–8 Leadership Portfolio is the summative product of this unit. It has five sections and each lesson closes one of them — tuakana charter, identity tree, digital decisions, waka roles and source checking, and transition goals. Print one booklet per student before Lesson 1 and assess the completed booklet at the end of Lesson 5; the individual record of each student's thinking across the sequence is the evidence.

If you run the optional launch activities, the class may also co-author a class charter from the Whānau Web contributions. That charter is a living agreement rather than an assessed product — it has no rubric, and its quality is tested by whether the class actually uses it through the year.

Lesson arc: Five lessons, each closing one section of the Leadership Portfolio. The arc moves from relationship (Lesson 1, Tuakana-Teina — who am I to the people around me?) through self (Lesson 2, Navigating Identity) and conduct (Lesson 3, Digital Citizenship) to working with others (Lesson 4, Collaborative Inquiry) and finally outward (Lesson 5, Community Leadership). Run it at the start of the year before subject-specific units begin.

Optional launch activities: The two activities below sit before Lesson 1 and produce no portfolio section. They are a way to open the year while a class is still forming, not a required part of the sequence.

• Activity 1 — The Whānau Web (He Kūiti Whanaungatanga): Teams of four brainstorm what a high-performance learning whānau looks, sounds, and feels like. Every person contributes at least one strength. The output is a shared vocabulary for the class culture — words and commitments that will be used for the rest of the year. Key move: the teacher does not supply the norms. Students generate them. This is not consultation; it is genuine co-authorship. The curriculum's framing of adolescent resilience (needing others, feeling stuck, asking for support) should surface explicitly in teacher-facilitated debrief.
• Activity 2 — Pūrākau Timeline (He Mahere Tau): Students create a visual timeline of the year: school events, cultural milestones (Matariki, Waitangi Day, term breaks), and three personal challenge points where they predict they might struggle. Naming a challenge point before it arrives is a planning skill the curriculum explicitly requires for adolescent self-management. The timeline is kept in student planners or class wall space — it is a reference tool, not a one-time activity.
• Optional companion — Class Charter (Te Tiriti o Tō Tātou Akomanga): Students synthesise the Whānau Web contributions into a class charter: a shared agreement about how this whānau will work, what support looks like, and what happens when someone needs to ask for help. Each student signs it. The charter is displayed prominently and revisited at the start of each term. In terms of curriculum continuity, it is the social infrastructure on which every subsequent unit depends — a class that cannot work collaboratively cannot learn from project-based, inquiry, or discussion-heavy units.

Beyond the unit: This starter pack does not lead into a single follow-on unit — it leads into the whole year. The norms, planning tools, and help-seeking language established here are the operating conditions for every unit that follows. Keep the completed portfolios accessible and refer back to what students wrote in them when introducing new units, resolving conflict, and celebrating growth. Students who leave Year 7 knowing how to name a challenge point and ask for support are more equipped for every subsequent transition — Year 9, NCEA, beyond school.