Creating an ANZAC Day Refreshed Social Sciences Lesson Series with Gemini

Written by Dr Craig Hansen · 13 September 2026 · 17 min read

Multi-level classrooms are a reality across Aotearoa New Zealand — from rural schools where a single teacher might juggle eight year levels in one room, to kura that deliberately group tamariki in whānau-based clusters. It is one of the most persistent challenges in NZ education: how do we plan learning that is curriculum-aligned, age-appropriate, and manageable — all at once?

In this solo episode of the ChatAI Podcast, I walk through a practical workflow using Google Gemini to plan an integrated ANZAC Day lesson series built on the refreshed NZ Social Sciences curriculum. The goal: a five-lesson sequence for Years 5–6, plus an iterated version for Years 3–4, all generated from a single well-structured prompt and three uploaded documents.

The Multi-Level Classroom Challenge

Many NZ schools face the reality of multiple year groups sharing one classroom. Whether it is the size of the school or a deliberate philosophical choice to cluster tamariki in whānau groupings, the challenge is the same: our refreshed curriculum is organised around year levels, but our classrooms are not. This is particularly acute in our rural schools, where I recently spent time with principals managing eight different year levels in a single room — with one teacher who is also the principal, the finance manager, and the property manager.

Integrated planning is the answer. By choosing a powerful unifying theme — in this case, ANZAC Day — and bringing in the refreshed Social Sciences curriculum alongside it, we can create learning sequences that are rich, curriculum-aligned, and differentiated across year levels without burning out our teachers.

Starting with Gemini: AI as a Search Engine

Before we upload any documents, we start the way you would with any search: by asking Gemini to tell us about ANZAC Day in the New Zealand context and its connection to the refreshed Social Sciences curriculum. Gemini is Google’s answer to Perplexity — an AI-powered search engine that pulls from live web sources, including the Google Sites that many Manaiakalani and other NZ schools have made public to share learning with whānau.

What I love about this initial step is that Gemini surfaces locally relevant material. It finds UKD (Understand, Know, Do) frameworks from real school planning documents. It references the refreshed curriculum phases. It brings in the language of civics, geography, and history — all of which sit inside the refreshed Social Sciences learning area. This gives us a strong foundation of context before we go deeper.

Three Documents for RAG: Curriculum, Concept Mapping, and Glossary

The real power comes when we upload three documents to Gemini and use Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Instead of letting the AI roam freely across the internet, we point its brain at our specific documents:

• The refreshed Social Sciences curriculum — the actual NZ curriculum document with knowledge and practices for each year level
• Concept mapping — the alignment of concepts across year groups, ensuring vertical coherence
• The glossary — all the important vocabulary that students need to encounter

Why the glossary matters so much: language is a doorway to learning. When we front-load the vocabulary — weaving it into our English programme, our spelling lists, sharing it with whānau so parents can quiz their tamariki at home — we open that door before the instruction even begins. This is particularly important because the refreshed curriculum sits at least a year of academic expectations higher than its predecessor, particularly in mathematics. Some students may have a two-year gap between where they are and where the curriculum expects them to be. Front-loading vocabulary is one way we bridge that gap.

Building the Prompt: A Five-Lesson Series for Years 5–6

With our three documents uploaded, the prompt I crafted asked Gemini to:

1. Refer to the content in the chat above and the attached Social Sciences curriculum for Years 5 and 6
2. Draw upon the most relevant knowledge and practices that match the study of ANZAC Day in the Aotearoa New Zealand context
3. Reference the concept mapping to ensure relevant concepts are surfaced
4. Reference the glossary so all important words related to the concepts are included
5. Create a series of five lessons, each 35 minutes, using the gradual release of responsibility and the Understand, Know, Do (UKD) framework
6. Ensure ANZAC Day is the unifying theme across the series

What Gemini produced was a well-structured five-lesson sequence that moved through Civics and Society, History, and critical thinking — asking whose voice is present and whose voice might be missing in ANZAC narratives. Each lesson followed the gradual release of responsibility: teacher-led focus, guided modelling, paired concept check, and reflection/wrap-up. It cited the glossary and the curriculum directly, confirming it was genuinely RAG-ing from our documents rather than generating from its general training data.

Locking Down Version One: Export to Google Docs

Before we iterate or differentiate, the first rule is to lock down version one. Gemini has an “Export to Docs” option (the three dots at the bottom of the response) that sends the entire output to a Google Doc in your Drive. This is important for three reasons:

• You have a clean, shareable first version that can be distributed to your teaching team
• Tables that Gemini generates are preserved and properly formatted in the Google Doc (they are very hard to create manually inside Gemini)
• You can then edit, modify, and differentiate from a stable baseline rather than chasing changes in a chat window

One tip: Gemini loves to use markdown formatting for diagrams and flowcharts. When exported to Docs, this can look like redacted text — black highlighting with invisible text. Simply select the text, change the background colour to none, and the text colour to black (or white, depending on your theme) to reveal the content. Or better yet, add a note in your prompt: “Do not use markdown formatting for diagrams or visuals — use tables instead.”

Iterating for Years 3–4: Edit the Prompt, Don’t Start Fresh

Here is the critical workflow move: when you need a version for a different year level, do not start a new chat. Go back to your original prompt, click “Edit prompt,” and change every instance of “Years 5 and 6” to “Years 3 and 4.” Why? Because the entire chat history — all the context, all the uploaded documents, all the RAG setup — becomes part of the prompt. Starting fresh means losing all of that carefully constructed context.

By editing the original prompt, Gemini keeps the same lesson structure, the same UKD framework, the same gradual release of responsibility — but adjusts the knowledge and practices to the correct phase. Year 3 sits in Phase 1, Year 4 in Phase 2, so Gemini pulls from across those phases. The result: a parallel five-lesson series that follows the same flow as your Years 5–6 version, just at the appropriate curriculum level. No confusion for you, no confusion for the children.

From Consolidating to Proficient: The Mid-Year Shift

One of the most important concepts in the refreshed curriculum is the shift from consolidating to proficient. In the first half of the year, students working at year level are consolidating — they are applying knowledge and practices, but they still rely on prompting guides, checklists, modelling books, and teacher scaffolds. They look at models, then go back to their work.

The shift to proficient, which typically happens in the second half of the year, is marked by the student’s ability to transfer their knowledge to other contexts without needing those prompting guides. This is why the critical thinking questions in the lesson series matter so much — questions like “Whose voice is present and whose voice might be missing?” and “How does our project help our school community show respect and practise manaakitanga on ANZAC Day?” These questions push students to generalise, justify, and apply their learning beyond the immediate lesson, which is exactly what enables that move from consolidating to proficient.

Supporting Rural Schools

I recently had the privilege of spending time with some of our great rural school principals. They shared the reality of having eight different year levels in one classroom — with one teacher who is simultaneously the principal, the finance manager, the property manager, and everything else. This is not an edge case. New Zealand has a really large association of rural schools, and this is their daily reality.

This workflow — upload three documents, write one strong prompt, lock down version one, then iterate by editing the prompt for each year level — is designed with those schools in mind. Once you have the first version right, you can generate differentiated versions for every year group in your classroom in minutes, not hours. That is the equity promise of AI in education: it is the biggest equity move we can make in our generation.

Adding Multimedia: Infographics, Songs, and Videos

Once your lesson series is locked down, you can enrich it with multimedia — all inside Gemini. The plus button lets you:

• Create an infographic to share with whānau or use as a visual prompt for students
• Generate a video (if your IT services team has enabled it)
• Create a song — a rap, a reggae track, or even a hard rock anthem — around the content in your chat to help embed the learning through music

These multimedia elements deepen engagement and cater to different learning preferences, all while staying anchored to the curriculum content you have already RAG-ed into the chat.

Video Timestamps

Key Takeaways

What This Means for NZ Educational Leaders

If you are a principal, a curriculum leader, or a classroom teacher facing multi-level planning, this workflow is designed for you. The combination of RAG, the UKD framework, and prompt iteration means you can produce curriculum-aligned, differentiated lesson series in a fraction of the time it would take to build from scratch — and the quality improves with each iteration because the AI is working from your actual curriculum documents.

The equity argument is straightforward: the schools that need this most — rural schools with extreme multi-level classrooms and limited release time — are the schools where this workflow saves the most planning hours. As I said in the video: AI is the biggest equity move we can make in our generation. If you want to explore this further, reach out — I would love to help your school or Kāhui Ako build these workflows into your planning practice.