Description
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 response activities complete with activity explainer videos for exploring thinking skills and developing emotional understandings and compassionate inquiry including:
- Blooms Higher Order Thinking activities
- Book Club guide for deepening text discussion
- A range of activities to explore emotional understanding, compassionate inquiry, empathy development, vocabulary and developing skills for self and co-regulation.
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
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