Sun Gum Saan – New Gold Mountain Digital Lesson Plans

By Sun Gum Saan – New Gold Mountain Media Release | Posted:

Resources designed to help your ākonga learn about and explore the world of Cantonese settlers in Aotearoa New Zealand.

At the Chinese New Year celebrations in Lawrence in 2023 we announced the launch of our Chinese New Zealand lesson plans to teach local migrant history under the new Aotearoa Histories curriculum.

We are excited to announce our website newgoldmountain.nz is now live incorporating digital lesson plans and resources using Google Docs.

Trials of our lesson plans were undertaken over the last year, at two area schools, Columba College in Dunedin and Lawrence Area School to obtain a cross section of appraisal from both rural and urban perspectives. We then took the feedback from those schools and revised our plans.

When the Aotearoa Histories curriculum was announced we realised that this was a significant adjustment for teachers. The new curriculum presented an opportunity to incorporate local migrant history. To do this we took the approach to assist teachers at a practical level by preparing lesson plans with resources so teachers would not need to do this work themselves.

Chinese people, culture and community are an important part of Otago and Southland history. The Directors of Sun Gum San Limited are all members of the Chinese community and some are descendants of Poll Taxpayers. It is also central from our community point of view that we are involved in the telling and sharing of our community history.

We want to ensure that such lessons are of a high standard and quality. When we announced the desire to tell the part that the Chinese community has played in our local history we were met with overwhelming support. The lessons were designed by a professional historian and educators, and refereed and trialled to ensure that they meet required standards.

In preparing these stories we have also linked into other themes such as environmental issues and sought to ensure that we have considered how our own Chinese stories fit in with national and global historical issues.

We believe our launch is timely as the new Histories curriculum has been in place for a year now and it has been recently reported that teachers would value lesson templates and resources to support them in implementing the new curriculum.

The above two issues were also identified in the recent ERO report on the progress on teaching the curriculum.

Currently we have lesson plans covering years 1-6 and are developing years 7-10 to round off the new history curriculum’s intended coverage. The complete lesson plans, together with resources, are available for a minimal annual subscription per school. For the first year to 3 December 2024 the charge is $110 plus GST as an introductory offer, which takes into account the part year. A full year subscription is $150 plus GST. This is a social enterprise model to enable us to continue with our work developing new plans.

Please visit our website and see our fabulous lesson plans for yourselves: newgoldmountain.nz/resources