Double Backflip by Rose Lu is a warm, emotionally rich short story that follows Annie as she navigates change within her family while striving to be seen and celebrated for who she is. Set around Annie’s passion for gymnastics and her determination to master a double backflip, the story gently explores sibling adjustment, shifting family attention, and the quiet feelings that can emerge when a new baby arrives. Through close character perspective, sensory detail, and authentic dialogue, readers gain insight into Annie’s inner world and her need for connection, reassurance, and belonging.

Blending moments of humour, tenderness, and triumph, the text supports students to think deeply about relationships, empathy, and resilience. It invites discussion about how families adapt to change, how emotions are expressed, and how perseverance and support help young people find their place, making it a strong and relatable text for upper primary learners.

This pack includes three clearly structured lesson overviews designed to support close, shared and independent reading. Each lesson provides a direct link to the text, purposeful warm-up questions, focused do now activities, explicit teaching of key technical and subject-specific language, exit tickets, and opportunities for student self-assessment.

The three lesson overviews focus on:

1. Comprehension and inferencing, supporting students to locate information, make meaning, and draw conclusions from the text;

2. The author’s use of language and structure, exploring how word choice, sentence structure, and text features shape meaning; and

3. Author’s purpose and themes, encouraging students to think critically about ideas, messages, and viewpoints.

Curriculum Phase: Phase 2

Year Level: Year 5

English: reading for meaning, analysing character motivation and emotional change, exploring narrative voice and dialogue, inferring themes and messages, summarising key events, and supporting ideas with evidence from the text
Health and Physical Education: emotional wellbeing, managing change, resilience, confidence, perseverance, physical activity and safety
Social Sciences: family structures, relationships across generations, identity and belonging, understanding change within families and communities

Fiction: realistic narrative, short story

Key words include: change, character development, China, emotional wellbeing, empathy, family, grandparents, gymnastics, identity, narrative text, parents, perseverance, realistic fiction, relationships, resilience, siblings, short story, sport, trampoline, wellbeing