Description
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.
The three lesson overviews focus on:
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Comprehension and inferencing, supporting students to locate information, make meaning, and draw conclusions from the text;
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The author’s use of language and structure, exploring how word choice, sentence structure, and text features shape meaning; and
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Author’s purpose and themes, encouraging students to think critically about ideas, messages, and viewpoints.
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
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