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 a range of structured literacy activities including

• Spelling rules ck / dge / drop the e / y as a consonant or vowel
• Sounds of -ed
• Exploring parts of language - adverbs, adjectives, nouns, verbs etc
• Doubling or not when adding -ing, -ed
• Floss rules
• Compound words
• Identifying and naming suffixes
• Identifying and naming prefixes
• Vowel teams
• Root words
• Controlling 'r'
• Diagraphs
• Schwa words
• Ghost diagraphs
• -oo- and -oo- / -au and -ow / 
• Hard and soft c and g
• Common subordinating conjunctions
• And much more!!

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