A story highlighting the week leading up to the narrator’s mother’s funeral, with all its sadness and confusion and overwhelming sense of loss. Support comes from the narrator’s extended family – and the sense that her many aunties will continue to be there in the future, providing the kind of support and love that usually comes from a mother. The text includes references to a girl’s first period.

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. 

Themes explored include: aunty, change, changing body, Cook Island, culture, death, family, funeral, grief, loss, menstruation, Pacific, period, puberty, Ngutu‘are tangata, resilience, support, wellbeing, whānau