Description
Aroha Mai, Aroha Atu by Isobel Te Aho-White is a warm and engaging graphic text from School Journal Level 4 that explores kindness, creativity, and community through everyday interactions. Set in a shared apartment foyer, the story follows Seph and Hoani as small acts of aroha and manaakitanga transform relationships between neighbours, showing how generosity and creativity can build belonging and connection.
Through dialogue, visual storytelling, and recurring settings, the text invites students to think deeply about how actions affect others and how communities are shaped. It provides rich opportunities for students to make personal connections, interpret visual and written cues, and reflect on how aroha can be both given and received.
This pack contains wide range of response activities including:
- A guided reading plan exploring key literacy elements including inference and deduction, language use, making connection and text organisation, along with key questioning to promote emotional intelligence, metacognition and compassionate inquiry.
- An independent learning contract complete with explainer videos for activity clarity
- A wide range of response activities to support developing and embedding key literacy skills including sentence and word work, spelling, and cloze activities.
Curriculum Phase: Phase 2
Year Level: Year 4
English – Reading: comprehension, inference, visual literacy, narrative structure, character development, themes, author’s purpose, making connections
Health and Physical Education (Wellbeing): relationships, empathy, kindness, belonging
The Arts (Visual Arts): creativity, visual storytelling, responding to and interpreting artworks
Text type: Graphic text / narrative fiction
Key words include: aroha, art, arts, arts integration, author’s purpose, belonging, character development, comic, comics, community, crafts, creativity, crochet, drawing, family, friendship, generosity, graphic text, identity, inference, kindness, making connections, manaakitanga, narrative fiction, narrative structure, neighbours, oral language, reading comprehension, relationships, themes, visual literacy, wellbeing, whānau
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