Four Stories by Jock Phillips is an informative non-fiction text that uses four objects to explore stories of survival from Aotearoa New Zealand’s past. Through a school uniform from the 1931 Napier earthquake, a handmade purse from stranded sealers on Solander Island, a carved kurī discovered in Monck’s Cave, and a life-saving rocket used off the Tīmaru coast, the text shows how everyday objects can reveal powerful histories. Each story combines historical detail with human experience, helping students understand how people responded to natural disasters, isolation, technological challenges, and changing environments. Carefully structured and richly illustrated, the text supports students to see history as layered, personal, and connected to place and material culture. 

The text is ideal for integrated learning across literacy, social sciences, and technology, supporting inquiry into survival, historical perspective, artefacts, and how objects can be used as sources of evidence in Aotearoa New Zealand histories.

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 3–4):
reading for meaning and critical thinking, synthesising information across multiple sections, analysing how structure supports meaning, interpreting visual and written sources, building historical vocabulary

Social Sciences – Aotearoa New Zealand Histories:
local and national history, continuity and change, survival and adaptation, human responses to challenge, identity and belonging, use of historical sources

Technology:
technological change, problem-solving, tools and innovations from the past

Text type:
Non-fiction, historical report, multi-text collection, informational text

Key words include:
artefacts, survival, history, Napier earthquake, Harold Pond, natural disasters, sealers, sealing, Solander Island, Foveaux Strait, kurī, Monck’s Cave, moa, taonga, archaeology, technology, life-saving rocket, Tīmaru, Volunteer Rocket Brigade, sailing ships, shipwrecks, colonisation, adaptation, resilience, storytelling, objects as evidence, Aotearoa New Zealand histories