Beans on Toast by Eamonn Marra is a contemporary fiction text that explores family relationships, humour, and loyalty through the perspective of a younger sibling navigating jealousy and responsibility after his brother is injured. Through realistic dialogue and everyday moments, Marra captures the emotional shifts within a household as attention, privileges, and routines change. The text follows Joseph as he grapples with frustration, fairness, and empathy, revealing how small acts of care can rebuild connection and trust. Warm, humorous, and deeply relatable, the story supports students to understand sibling relationships and personal growth through lived experience and voice.

The text is ideal for integrated learning across literacy and health, supporting inquiry into relationships, emotional regulation, and empathy in everyday family life.

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 7

English (NZC Levels 4–5): reading for meaning and critical thinking, analysing character perspective and voice, understanding narrative structure and dialogue, exploring humour and tone, synthesising events and themes, identifying author’s message

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

Text type: Fiction, short story, realistic narrative

Key words include: family, humour, loyalty, parkour, relationships, siblings, whānau, empathy, jealousy, responsibility, fairness, connection, trust