Something Found by Sophie Taylor-Brown (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Korokī, Ngāti Paoa) is a reflective fiction text that weaves personal experience with themes of change, family, and healing to explore a young girl’s response to her parents’ separation. Through gentle narrative and rich sensory detail, the story follows Zoe as she spends a weekend at the family bach with her father and searches the beach for a special object to bring home to her artist mother. The text situates Zoe’s treasure hunt within memories of happier family times, showing how loss, hope, and reconnection can exist side by side. The discovery of a bird skull becomes a powerful symbol of finding meaning in unexpected places and learning to accept that life does not always go to plan. Tender, thoughtful, and emotionally resonant, the text supports students to understand relationships and resilience through lived experience and voice.

The text is ideal for integrated learning across literacy and health, supporting inquiry into family relationships, emotional change, belonging, and coping with uncertainty 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 3
Year Level: Year 6

English (NZC Levels 4–5): reading for meaning and critical thinking, analysing narrative voice and character perspective, understanding reflective fiction, exploring symbolism and imagery, synthesising events and themes, identifying author’s message

Health and Physical Education: wellbeing, emotional awareness, relationships, coping with change, resilience, communication, support systems

Social Sciences – Aotearoa New Zealand Histories: identity and belonging, family and community, continuity and change, personal stories within social contexts

Text type: Fiction, personal recount, reflective narrative

Key words include: change, family, parents, separation, holidays, beach, treasure, finding meaning, grief, hope, resilience, relationships, whānau, identity, belonging, memory, symbolism, curiosity, emotional growth, healing, nature, objects, art, observation