Crabs by Romesh Dissanayake is a warm, reflective short story that explores family, friendship, and belonging through the eyes of Dev, a young boy navigating change in his life. When a rainy day disrupts his plans, an unexpected fishing trip with a friend and his grandparents leads to connection, cultural sharing, and a renewed sense of comfort at home. Blending contemporary New Zealand life with Sri Lankan food traditions, the text gently examines resilience, relationships, and the importance of community.

The text works well for guided reading, close reading, thematic study, and cross-curricular learning linking literacy, culture, and wellbeing.

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 3

Year Level: Year 8

English – Reading:  Reading for meaning and inference, exploring character development, internal dialogue, and theme, analysing how cultural context shapes narrative, integrating procedural writing through the included recipe

Social Sciences: identity, culture, community participation, continuity and change, cause and consequence, Pacific histories in Aotearoa New Zealand

Health and Physical Education: wellbeing, belonging, participation, collective identity, cultural expression

Text Type: short story, narrative fiction, contemporary fiction

Key words include: belonging, change, community, connection, cooking, crab curry, crab fishing, crab traps, cultural identity, curry, empathy, family, fishing, food and culture, friendship, friends, grandparents, healing, homemade traps, identity, intergenerational relationships, migration, multicultural texts, parents, procedural text, recipes, relationships, resilience, separation, shared meals, Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan culture, Sri Lankan food, traps, wellbeing, wharf fishing