Banana Skins by Bernard Beckett is a humorous reflective fiction text that weaves everyday family life with environmental responsibility to explore how small actions can create meaningful change. Through lively dialogue and comic situations, the story follows Sadie as she becomes determined to teach her forgetful father how to recycle properly. The narrative blends science ideas about waste, methane, and climate change with relatable family conflict, showing how frustration, patience, and persistence are all part of learning new habits. By using humour and problem-solving strategies such as reminders and a sticker chart, the text highlights that behaviour change happens gradually and is strengthened through encouragement rather than blame. Playful, engaging, and purposeful, the text supports students to understand sustainability and responsibility through lived experience and voice.

The text is ideal for integrated learning across literacy, science, and health, supporting inquiry into environmental action, family relationships, perseverance, and everyday choices in Aotearoa New Zealand.

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 4

English (NZC Levels 3–4): reading for meaning and critical thinking, analysing narrative voice and humour, understanding reflective fiction, synthesising events and ideas, exploring author’s message, identifying cause and effect

Science – Living World: human impact on the environment, decomposition, methane and greenhouse gases, waste management, composting, sustainability

Health and Physical Education: wellbeing, relationships, problem-solving, emotional regulation, resilience, communication, responsibility

Text type: Fiction, personal recount, reflective narrative, humorous narrative

Key words include: climate change, compost, decomposition, environment, family, father and daughter, greenhouse gases, habits, humour, landfill, learning, methane, parents, patience, perseverance, positive reinforcement, problem-solving, recycling, responsibility, routines, sustainability, sticker chart, waste, whānau, behaviour change, community action, everyday activism, environmental stewardship, kaitiakitanga