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 a range of structured literacy activities including

• Spelling rules ck / dge / drop the e / y as a consonant or vowel
• Sounds of -ed
• Exploring parts of language - adverbs, adjectives, nouns, verbs etc
• Doubling or not when adding -ing, -ed
• Floss rules
• Compound words
• Identifying and naming suffixes
• Identifying and naming prefixes
• Vowel teams
• Root words
• Controlling 'r'
• Diagraphs
• Schwa words
• Ghost diagraphs
• -oo- and -oo- / -au and -ow / 
• Hard and soft c and g
• Common subordinating conjunctions
• And much more!!

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