45+ New Zealand Legends – New Zealanders who have changed or benefitted the world in some way – are featured on NZEDGE.com. Working from New Zealand and internationally, these scientists, artists, designers, inventors, warriors, and adventurers are inspiration for achievement. Learn about and celebrate world-changing New Zealanders with these Social Studies materials, content and images.
Kate Sheppard
The leader and main figurehead of the suffragist movement in New Zealand – the first country in the world to grant universal adult suffrage to men and women equally. Kate was a source of inspiration to suffragists and campaigners for equality between the sexes, both in New Zealand and throughout the world…
Read more here.
Download the Kate Sheppard education pack: Student Resource: study ideas, questions and activities (pdf)
Rewi Alley
Rewi Alley; social reformer, educator, fireman, writer, poet, translator, great internationalist, industrialist, revered citizen, potter, soldier, a hero and a friend of China. Edgar Snow, the famous American journalist: “Rewi Alley is unique because he has achieved greatness in a country where few foreigners ever manage to achieve an authentic ripple.” The most travelled European in the Chinese interior and its ‘white veteran’, associate of Mao and Che Guevara. Author of 66 books, always with the aim of bringing about a greater understanding of his second homeland and its people. The man who introduced ‘Gung Ho’ into the Western idiom…
Read more here.
Download the Rewi Alley education pack: Student Resource: study ideas, questions and activities (pdf)
Alexander Aitken
Alexander Aitken was the greatest mathematician of his era and possessed an astonishing computational brain that could complete challenges that today are reserved for the most complex computers. As one of the most remarkable mathematical brains of all time, Aitken could recite Pi to 707 decimal places, multiply two nine digit numbers in his head in 30 seconds, and render fractions to 26 decimal places in under five seconds…
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Download the Alexander Aitken education pack: Student Resource: study ideas, questions and activities (pdf)
Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield revolutionised the 20th Century English short story. Her best work shakes itself free of plots and endings and gives the story, for the first time, the expansiveness of the interior life, the poetry of feeling, the blurred edges of personality. She is taught worldwide because of her historical importance but also because her prose offers lessons in entering ordinary lives that are still vivid and strong. Her fiction retains its relevance through its open-endedness—its ability to raise discomforting questions about identity, belonging and desire…
Read more here.
Download the Katherine Mansfield education pack: Student Resource: study ideas, questions and activities (pdf)
