Five People Talk about Identity by Kate Paris is a reflective non-fiction text that weaves personal stories with wider ideas about culture, belonging, and self-understanding. Through five individual portraits, the author explores how identity is shaped by family, language, experiences, challenges, and community. The text presents diverse voices, including young people and adults, who reflect on kindness, dual cultures, disability, migration, and pride in heritage. By highlighting everyday experiences alongside deeper personal insight, the narrative shows that identity is not fixed but grows and changes over time. Thoughtful, inclusive, and deeply human, the text supports students to understand identity through lived experience and voice.

The text is ideal for integrated learning across literacy, health, and social sciences, supporting inquiry into identity, diversity, resilience, and belonging in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand.

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 2

Year Level: Year 6

English: reading for meaning and critical thinking, analysing author perspective and multiple viewpoints, understanding personal recounts and biographical profiles, synthesising information across texts, exploring language used to express identity and values

Health and Physical Education: wellbeing, identity, relationships, emotional awareness, resilience, respect for difference

Social Sciences – Aotearoa New Zealand Histories: culture and community, continuity and change, belonging, migration and heritage, identity formation, collective values

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

Key words include: autism, colonisation, community, culture, Dalai Lama, family, identity, kindness, manaakitanga, personalities, Punjab, reading, role models, Sāmoa, Sikhs, twins, whānau, writing