The Wharepaku Trick by Steph Matuku is a warm, humorous short story that follows a group of cousins determined to finish their bush hut during a weekend at the marae. While their parents practise for Te Matatini, the children devise a sneaky plan to avoid kitchen duties and get back to building. But Auntie Bea is harder to fool than they expect, and an unexpected act of generosity challenges their assumptions about her. Through lively dialogue, playful exaggeration, and naturally woven te reo Māori, readers experience the affection, expectations, and shared responsibilities that shape life within this whānau.

Blending mischief, teamwork, and a satisfying twist, the text supports students to think deeply about contribution, fairness, and relationships across generations. It invites discussion about balancing personal interests with collective responsibilities, looking beyond first impressions, and recognising the care behind an adult’s actions. The familiar tensions between wanting to play and needing to help make this an engaging and relatable text for upper 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 6

English: eading for meaning, analysing character motivation and changing perceptions, exploring dialogue, humour and exaggeration, interpreting te reo Māori through context, identifying how a twist develops meaning, inferring themes and messages, and supporting ideas with evidence from the text

Health and Physical Education: cooperation, communication, fairness, taking responsibility, recognising others’ contributions, and building positive relationships

Social Sciences: whānau relationships, marae life, shared responsibilities, collective participation, reciprocity, and the importance of cultural events such as Te Matatini

Fiction: realistic narrative, short story

Key words include: Aotearoa New Zealand, assumptions, character development, cooperation, cousins, dialogue, fairness, family, generosity, humour, kapa haka, marae, relationships, responsibility, shared duties, short story, teamwork, Te Matatini, te reo Māori, whānau, wharekai, wharepaku