Coconut Crabs by Amy McDaid is a reflective fiction text that explores friendship, anxiety, and intergenerational care through the relationship between a young girl and her grandmother. When Emily’s best friend is away, she develops mysterious stomach pains that conveniently keep her home from school. Through humorous inner monologue and warm dialogue, the story reveals how Emily’s worries about loneliness and fitting in surface as physical symptoms. As the day unfolds, her grandmother Māmā gently challenges Emily’s thinking, using stories, practical wisdom, and a memorable green drink to help her reconnect with her feelings. The shared time outdoors becomes a turning point, showing how listening, honesty, and connection can restore calm and confidence. Warm, funny, and deeply reassuring, the text supports students to understand wellbeing through lived experience and voice. 

The text is ideal for integrated learning across literacy and health, supporting inquiry into emotions, friendship, anxiety, intergenerational relationships, and wellbeing in everyday life.

This pack contains wide range of response activities including:

• A guided reading plan exploring key literacy elements including inference and deduction, language use, making connection and text organisation, along with key questioning to promote emotional intelligence, metacognition and compassionate inquiry. 
• An independent learning contract complete with explainer videos for activity clarity
  
• A wide range of response activities to support developing and embedding key literacy skills including sentence and word work, spelling, and cloze activities. 

Curriculum Phase: Phase 3

Year Level: Year 5

English (NZC Levels 3–4):
reading for meaning and critical thinking, analysing narrative voice and dialogue, understanding character development, exploring humour and theme, making connections to personal experience

Health and Physical Education:
wellbeing, emotional awareness, managing worry, relationships, communication, resilience

Text type:
Fiction, reflective narrative, short story

Key words include:
friendship, anxiety, worry, wellbeing, emotions, grandparents, māmā, family, whānau, loneliness, school, health anxiety, humour, dialogue, inner thoughts, coping strategies, reassurance, intergenerational relationships, care, confidence, resilience