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 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: 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

Key words include: animal rescue, communication, community, comprehension, Cyclone Gabrielle, cyclones, curriculum-aligned texts NZ, dog behaviour, dog language, dogs, empathy, floods, friendship, generosity, Hawke’s Bay, inference, kindness, non-fiction, pets, real-life narrative, relationships, resilience, SPCA, themes, volunteers, weather