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 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 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