Description
The Big Rescue by Steph Matuku is a reflective fiction text that weaves family storytelling with humour to explore how stories change as they are retold and how truth, memory, and imagination can blur together. Through the voice of a curious child, the narrative revisits a much-loved family tale about a dramatic rescue that grows more exciting with each retelling. As different family members share their versions, the story is gradually revealed to be far less heroic than first imagined, yet still meaningful in its own way. By playfully unpicking exaggeration and embellishment, the text highlights the joy of oral storytelling and the bonds it creates within whānau. Warm, funny, and gently revealing, the text supports students to understand communication and perspective through lived experience and voice.
The text is ideal for integrated learning across literacy and social sciences, supporting inquiry into storytelling, family relationships, humour, and how narratives are shaped over time in everyday life.
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 2
Year Level: Year 4
English (NZC Levels 2–3): reading for meaning and enjoyment, analysing narrative voice and dialogue, understanding story structure and humour, making connections to personal experience, identifying how stories change with retelling
Social Sciences – Aotearoa New Zealand Histories: family and community life, communication across generations, continuity and change, identity and belonging
Text type: Fiction, narrative story, reflective narrative
Key words include: storytelling, tall tales, exaggeration, humour, family, whānau, communication, memory, truth and fiction, perspective, oral storytelling, cousins, aunties and uncles, grandparents, relationships, imagination, curiosity, listening, narrative voice, continuity and change
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