The Biggest Swim by Susan Paris is a reflective non-fiction text that weaves personal determination with environmental advocacy to explore the extraordinary endurance challenge of New Zealand swimmer Jono Ridler. Through first-hand narrative and biographical detail, the text follows Jono’s record-breaking swim from Aotea Great Barrier Island to Auckland’s North Shore, highlighting his goal-setting mindset, physical resilience, and ability to push through fear, exhaustion, and self-doubt. The story situates Jono’s achievement within the wider context of ocean health and marine conservation, showing how personal challenge can become a powerful platform for raising awareness and inspiring collective action. Dramatic, motivating, and deeply human, the text supports students to understand perseverance and purpose through lived experience and voice.

The text is ideal for integrated learning across literacy, health, and social sciences, supporting inquiry into resilience, leadership, environmental responsibility, and the power of individual action in Aotearoa New Zealand.

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 5

English (NZC Levels 3–4): reading for meaning and critical thinking, analysing author perspective and voice, understanding biography and personal recounts, synthesising information, exploring descriptive and persuasive language

Health and Physical Education: wellbeing, physical endurance, goal setting, resilience, emotional regulation

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

Text type: Non-fiction, personal recount, biographical narrative, informational text

Key words include: Aotea Great Barrier Island, campaign, challenge, conservation, endurance, goals, Great Barrier Island, Hauraki Gulf, marine conservation, ocean, pollution, record, sea, Tīkapa Moana, training, ultra-distance swimming