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.
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 4–5): 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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