NZ Women’s Suffrage: A Knowledge-Rich NZ History and Literacy Unit Phase 3

Stop teaching literacy skills in isolation! This comprehensive unit brings a pivotal moment in Aotearoa New Zealand’s history to life while systematically building the reading and writing skills your students need.

Grounded in the Science of Learning, this Women and the Vote unit is more than just a set of activities. It’s a carefully sequenced, 5-day journey designed to build deep, lasting historical knowledge and embed literacy development in a rich, meaningful context. Save yourself hours of planning with a resource that is ready to go and aligned with evidence-based best practices.

Why is This Approach So Effective?This unit is built on two key principles:

1. A Knowledge-Rich Approach: Reading comprehension is directly linked to background knowledge. By focusing deeply on the topic of women’s suffrage, we build a strong mental model for students, which they can draw on for all future learning.
2. Structured Literacy: We move beyond surface-level comprehension and explicitly teach the building blocks of language. Students will learn how complex sentences are built and how words carry meaning, empowering them to become more confident and capable writers and thinkers.

What’s Included? Everything You Need for 5 Days of Rich Learning:

• Explicit Instruction Slideshow (75+ Google Slides): Guide your students through the entire unit with a visually engaging presentation. It provides the structure for all your direct instruction, discussions, and activities, ensuring no student is left behind.
• Knowledge-Rich Core Text: A high-interest, complex non-fiction text that tells the story of the suffrage movement in New Zealand. To manage cognitive load, the text is broken into three manageable chunks for reading over three days.
• Structured Literacy Activities: A suite of integrated activities that target key literacy components:
  • Semantics: Explicitly teach Tier 2 & 3 vocabulary with definitions, examples, and analysis.
  • Syntax: Deconstruct and construct complex sentences from the text with sentence combining and expansion exercises.
  • Morphology: Investigate the power of prefixes, suffixes, and root words to unlock meaning.
• Deep Comprehension Tools: Use the provided graphic organisers and activities to move beyond basic recall. Includes a GIST summarising activity and a mind map for analysing text structure.
• Links to writing: An Writing to Inform: Explanation writing task
• Complete Teacher Guide and 5-Day Plan: A clear, easy-to-follow plan that lays out exactly how to run the unit over one week, saving you critical planning and prep time.

By the end of this unit, your students will be able to:

• Historical Knowledge: Explain the key concepts of suffrage, outline the timeline of the movement in Aotearoa, and describe the role of key figures like Kate Sheppard.
• Literacy Skills: Define and use essential academic vocabulary, analyse complex sentence structures, write a concise and accurate summary of a non-fiction text, and apply morphological knowledge to understand new words.

Download today and deliver a history unit that is engaging, powerful, and built on the science of how students actually learn.