Instructional Series
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Welcome to the English medium literacy instructional series teaching and learning resources for years 1 to 8.
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- Stories
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125 items - Showing 111 - 120
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Far from Home
by Heidi Wang
2020 Winner of the Elsie Locke writing prize
illustrations by Andrew Burdan
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Shrinking Violet
by James Brown
illustration by Sarah Wilkins
This sophisticated poem plays with the natural tension created when a poem’s form doesn’t seem to match the content. James Brown’s jaunty use of structure and rhythm challenges the reader to understand both what the poem is about and why the author made the decisions he made.
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by Cassandra Tse
illustrations by Jez Tuya
This humorous play is a take on a familiar scenario: thoughtless online behaviour and our sometimes unhealthy relationships with screens. Although grossly exaggerated, Cassandra Tse’s point is still relevant, cleverly side-stepping the usual sides by portraying the adults getting it wrong and the kids getting it right.
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Captain Cook Charting Our Islands
This article describes Captain Cook’s first visit to New Zealand where he charted the coastline. It focuses on Cook’s abilities as a skilled maker of charts and maps rather than as a great explorer. It also examines the maths involved in Cook’s chart making (a perfect, real-life example of maths in everyday life).
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Break-up Day
by Kyle Mewburn
Kyle Mewburn shares her experience of growing up as a transgender girl and explores gender in a way that shows how, despite the challenges and expectations of others, she managed to find a sense of identity and belonging.
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Press B
by Paul Mason; illustrations by Mat Tait
Paul Mason continues his story of a dystopian future, told from the perspective of Tre and Muse, both of whom have spent their young adult lives fighting back against the rulers. This latest instalment in the series is told using a comic format.
Information and tips for using comics in the classroom:
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Reducing our Footprint
by Sarah Connor
This is the final article in a series that explores climate change. The first explains what it is; the second explores the difficulties in making predictions about it; and this, the third, looks at the ways people have responded to the challenge of climate change. It profiles four different organisations or people: an e-bike company, food recyclers, a scientist who’s developed an app for the agricultural sector, and a hemp farmer.
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Save the Earth Song
by James Brown; illustrations by Jo Tronc
Poet James Brown explores the perils of inertia and disassociation when it comes to climate change. Implicit to the poem is a fundamental question: Why do so many people do nothing when we know the stakes are so high? This is a companion text to recent level 4 journal articles about climate change.
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Fleet of Foot
by Paula Morris; illustrations by Andrew Burdan
The movement of Māori to the cities in the 1950s and 1960s was one of the most significant movements of people in our recent history. Paula Morris has used stories from her whānau as a basis for “Fleet of Foot”, a work of fiction that sits alongside “Kei Te Tāone Nui”, an article in the same journal that also explores the topic of Māori urbanisation. The text has links to the Aotearoa New Zealand’s histories curriculum.
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Kei te Tāone Nui: Māori and the City (1945–1970)
by Samuel Denny, Caitlin Moffat-Young, and Aroha Harris
The post-Second-World-War era in Aotearoa New Zealand saw one of the fastest rates of urban migration in the world, with Māori migrating to cities in large numbers to take advantage of new economic opportunities. The “golden city” offered much, but it came at a high price. Despite an unquestioned narrative in Pākehā communities that New Zealand’s race relations were world leading, Māori moving to the city encountered prejudice and discrimination at many levels. Māori responded to these challenges in multiple ways, for example, by establishing formal and informal groups that strengthened collective expression of Māori cultural values and practices. By gathering together to debate and take action on key issues, the seeds were sown for the modern Māori protest movement as well as the forging of a new urban Māori identity.
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