Ancestors
Ancestors are deceased people who still bother you sometimes. Like crazy Great-Aunt Unice, who didn’t let being dead stop her expressing an opinion.
About this resource
Series: School Journal Level 4 June 2022
Reading year level: 8
Topics: ancestors, family, heritage, humour, identity, poetry, relatives, tūpuna, whānau
Ancestors
Words by James Brown
Illustrations by Anna Crichton
It’s freaky, but ancestors are not zombies or ghosts. Well, they’re sort of ghosts. They might haunt you if you’ve done something bad, just to teach you. But they kind of care too.
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More from this series
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School Journal Level 4 June 2022
Inside this School Journal is one comic (From Afghanistan to Aotearoa), one student writing (The Lesson), one memoir (Good Little Samoan Boy), one poem (Ancestors), two articles (Eruera Maihi Patuone: The Story of a Great Rangatira; Ngā Pepeha a Ngā Tūpuna), one story (The Bucket Man), and one biogr...
1 of 8From Afghanistan to Aotearoa
Imagine having to make an impossible choice: stay with the life you know in the country of your birth but face misery after misery – or risk everything. Flee your homeland, where your family has lived for generations, for the chance of a new beginning.
2 of 8The Lesson
Elsie gave a small sigh as she watched her granddaughter whizzing around the field. Cece was rambunctious, feisty, and – most importantly – persuasive, and she’d finally persuaded Elsie to let her drive the ride-on mower.
3 of 8Good Little Samoan Boy
I met my Samoan grandmother, Matalena, twice: once when I was at primary school and once when I was at high school. Both times it was pretty awkward.
4 of 8Eruera Maihi Patuone - The Story of a Great Rangatira
Eruera Maihi Patuone lived to be 108 (some say he was 112). Over his long life, he would witness enormous change. Patuone was a boy when Captain Cook first arrived, and he was one of the first rangatira to sign Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
5 of 8Ngā Pepeha a Ngā Tūpuna
It can be easy to think we’ve always had written language. But our ability to speak came long before our ability to write. People have been around for almost a million years, yet we’ve only had writing for the last five thousand.
6 of 8The Bucket Man
The last time it rained was the day I turned ten. I remember because that afternoon, I walked home from school for the last time. A half-hearted shower, over before it really started.
7 of 8Ann Evans Colonial Nurse
Ann Evans was never a doctor, although that’s what she was often called. She grew up in England in the 1840s.
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