This is the story of how we actually built our very first pack, the New Zealand Country Pack. If you'd rather watch it in action than read about it, we've got a full video walkthrough, linked at the end. Otherwise, here's exactly how it came together.
A year ago, the four of us sat down to a completely blank screen and just started listing our favorite things about New Zealand, the kind of list you'd hand a friend who was thinking about moving here or just wanted to actually know the place. All four of us had lived here at the time. Bailey's since moved to Ireland, but three of us still call New Zealand home, and we wanted to bring the real version of it to your kids, not the textbook one.
Where we actually started
We started with a book list, some titles that are on every single bookshelf in New Zealand, plus a few that just help explain the animals here, which our kids connect with more than almost anything else. Alongside that, we curated a list of music meant to introduce kids to some Māori culture, some of the songs our own kids first learned in preschool. Honestly though even our older kids (currently age 9 and almost 10) still enjoy them, because they combine Māori words with hand motions, so there's a real way to understand that side of the culture.
Food a kid would actually eat, and the craft that ties it together
We didn't want anything complicated or fancy for the food section. We wanted what a kid would actually bring in their lunchbox, or what would show up at a birthday party, which is how fairy bread and mousetraps ended up in the pack. Later, we decided that we had to add in the most iconic kiwi food: meat pie! A (relatively) simple homemade take on the classic Kiwi meat pie so you could have a taste of that at home. Then came the craft, poi, paired with the same music from earlier, which is what actually brings the Māori side of the day together in a more dynamic way.
The first draft wasn't the whole pack
That was genuinely the first draft, book list, music, food, and the poi craft. After we reviewed it, Fliss suggested we needed games, and that's what pushed the pack into a whole new section. We picked games that are already familiar, just with a Kiwi twist, everybody already knows tag, so we included the local version, Stuck in the Mud, and kids pick it up fast because the core game isn't new to them but rather a fun twist on something they already know.
Story, printables, and the bingo game
From there we added a cultural legend, a real Māori story that most kids growing up in New Zealand would already know, which gives the day a story time moment and a few more facts that land through a narrative instead of a list. We felt like the legend needed some pictures though to make it more interesting, so we had Christie paint some original watercolors for the legend (these have become a staple now and are part of every pack). If you can't get hold of the books on our list, the legend alone still carries that storytelling piece. We added coloring sheets alongside a worksheet to fill in too, our way of making sure the facts actually stick without needing a full lesson to do it. The last piece is a hands-on game (in this case it's Bingo), which teaches New Zealand animals alongside a few local symbols and landmarks while the kids are just playing.
Treat it like a menu, not a checklist
You don't have to do everything in the pack, though you certainly can. We built in a structure for spreading it across a few days if that's what works better for your family, but you can just as easily treat the whole thing like a menu, pull it up, and pick one thing from each category depending on what your kids are actually into that day.
So you can grab this pack and jump right into a Kiwi day with your family, without spending hours doing research yet knowing that what you're getting is a real cultural experience, packaged into one easy format so you can go exploring from home.
Watch the full video walkthrough here · Get the New Zealand Country Pack
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