Reading at home

Make reading fun

• Have fun singing along to songs or YouTube videos together.
• Read to your child every day. You can use your first language.
• Have a pile of reading materials available. For example, library books (non-fiction and fiction), online recipes, simple timetables, magazines, and any other reading that supports your child’s current interest.
• Encourage your child to retell favourite stories or parts of stories in their own words.
• Play video games and card games together. You can even make the cards yourself.

Make it real

• Reading makes more sense if your child can relate it to their own life. Help them to make connections between what they are reading and their own lives and experiences. For example, ‘That’s a funny story about a grandad. What does your grandad do that makes you laugh?’, ‘We saw a big mountain in that book, what is our mountain called, and where did the name come from?’
• Look for opportunities for your child to read wherever you are, for example, signs, advertising billboards, junk mail, recipes and online content.
• Show your child that reading is fun and important to you by letting them see you reading.

Find out together

• Visit the library often and help your child to choose books that interest them.
• Talk with older people or kaumātua in your family about interesting stories and people from your child’s past that you could find out more about together.
• Ask your child questions and support them to find the answers to widen their reading experiences. For example, ‘What’s the quickest biscuit recipe?’, ‘What time is the next bus to town?’
• Help your child with any words that they don’t understand. Look them up together in an online dictionary if you need to.

Writing at home

Writing for fun

• Talk about interesting words with your child, especially ones that are fun to say, like ‘hippopotamus’ or ‘ringaringa’. Short and simple games could involve finding how many little words can be found using the letters in the word ‘elephant’.
• Play word games together online or in local newspapers.
• Make up a story or think of a pakiwaitara | legend or traditional tale and act it out with costumes and music, write down the names of the characters or tīpuna | ancestors.
• Make up a play with your child. You could help your child to write the play down. Use puppets they design and make themselves to give a performance to the family.

Writing for a reason

• Writing for a real purpose can help your child want to write. For example, messaging an invitation to whānau, or writing thank you notes.
• Personalising notes by cutting, decorating, sticking, or stamping are great skills for coordinating fingers and being creative. You can create digital cards with your child too, by helping them find GIFs, filters, and other fun effects.
• Encourage your child to write what they need to pack for a holiday, dictate your shopping list to them, or get them to write a list of jobs that need doing.

Supporting your child's writing

• Talk to your child about what you are writing. Let them see you making lists, typing messages or filling in forms.
• When you need to complete a form, ask for or print an extra form so that your child can do their own ‘grown up’ writing.
• Display your child’s writing where others can admire and read it.
• Play with words. Find and discuss interesting new words. This can help increase the words your child uses when they write. Look words up in an online dictionary or online or talk to family and whānau members to learn the whakapapa | origins of the words.

Maths at home

Talk together and have fun with numbers, shapes, games, and patterns

Help your child to:

• find and connect numbers around your home and neighbourhood, for example, phone numbers, clocks, letterboxes, road signs, sign showing distance and so on
• name the number that is 10 more or 10 less than before or after a number up to 1000
• make patterns forwards and backwards in 1s, 2s, 5s, 10s and 100s starting with different numbers, for example, 13, 23, 33, 43…, …43, 33, 23, 13
• make different types of patterns by drumming, clapping, stamping, dancing or drawing patterns that repeat and describe this pattern for someone else to follow
• find out the ages and birth dates of family or whānau members
• do addition and subtraction problems using 2- and 3-digit numbers, for example, 231 + 245, 154 - 23
• use groups of 10 that add to 1,000 for example, 500 + 500, 300 + 700
• use and talk about simple fractions of groups or shapes, for example, cutting up a cake into 8 pieces for an eighth, or folding napkins into quarters.

Use easy, everyday activities

Involve your child in:

• telling the time using words like half past, quarter past and quarter to
• learning their 2, 5 and 10 times tables
• reading and sharing a book. Ask them questions about numbers in the story, and use the number of pages as a way to practise number facts
• doing a shape and number search when you are reading a book or looking at art, such as carvings and sculpture
• using a calendar to work out how many days until an important event
• using kitchen scales to weigh ingredients for cooking or baking.

For wet afternoons, school holidays and weekends

Get together with your child and:

• play games, for example, board games, games with dice, card games, jigsaw puzzles
• make your own advertising pamphlet. Cut out and sort images to go on it, make pretend money to spend
• make a play shop and take turns ‘buying’ things, and giving change for simple amounts of money
• grow seeds or sprouts and measure the growth each week
• create a repeating pattern
• go on a treasure hunt. Make a map with clues and see who can get to the treasure first
• dance to music and sing or clap to favourite songs, make up a dance sequence each – can you copy each other?
• both take turns closing your eyes and describing how to get from the front gate to the kitchen, from the kitchen to their bedroom, from home to school
• do timed activities. You hold the watch, and they count how many times they can bounce a ball in a minute
• play guess-and-check games using different shaped jars. How many beans, buttons, pegs in the container?
• help your child weigh or measure ingredients as you cook together.

Download the year 3 resources