After the Storm by Nan Blanchard is a quietly powerful narrative that captures the aftermath of a devastating storm through the eyes of a child. As floodwaters recede, the story focuses on everyday moments—clearing silt, sharing food, waiting for messages, and helping neighbours—that reveal resilience, care, and connection in the face of disruption. Through sensory detail, gentle humour, and close emotional perspective, the text shows how families and communities come together after crisis, highlighting empathy, kindness, and hope alongside loss and uncertainty.

Grounded in a realistic New Zealand context, the story supports students to explore how people respond to extreme weather events and how relationships, communication, and shared action help communities recover. It invites thoughtful discussion about emotions, responsibility, and looking after one another, making it a meaningful and relatable text for middle primary learners.

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: eading for meaning, making inferences, analysing character thoughts and feelings, identifying themes and author’s purpose, exploring narrative structure, using descriptive language, and supporting responses with evidence from the text
Health and Physical Education: relationships, empathy, communication, wellbeing

Text type: Fiction, realistic narrative, short story

Key words include: animals, community, cyclones, empathy, family, floods, friendship, kindness, relationships, resilience, storms, wellbeing, whānau