Reading at home 

Make reading fun 

• Read the books your child is reading and have discussions together about the books.
• Notice what they are keen on and encourage online research about topics of interest.
• Make your home a reader-friendly home with plenty of books and magazines that everyone can read. Look for books and magazines at fairs and second-hand shops. Ask your family or whānau if they have any they no longer want. 
• Share what you think and how you feel about the characters, the story or the opinions in online articles, magazines, and newspapers you are reading. It is important that your child sees you as a reader and you talk about what you are reading. 

Read together 

• Reading to your child is one of the most important things you can do, no matter how old they are. You can use your first language. 
• When you are reading to your child, you can talk about words or ideas that your child might not have come across before. 
• Children are often interested in new words and what they mean. Encourage them to look them up in an online dictionary or ask whānau | family about the meaning and origin. 

Keep them interested 

• Help your child identify an author, character or series of books they particularly like and find more in the series or by the author. 
• Talk about the lyrics of songs or waiata, or the words of poems your child is learning, and see if there are any links to who they are, and where they come from. 
• Subscribe to websites that have content that builds your child’s special interest, for example, animals, their iwi, kapa haka or disc golf. 
• Go to your local library to choose books together. These might be books your child can read easily by themselves. They might be books your child wants to read but are a bit hard - you can help by reading a page to them, then helping them read the next one. 
• Play video and board games together – the more challenging the better. 

Writing at home 

Make writing fun 

• Encourage your child to write about their heroes, tīpuna | ancestors, sports events, hobbies and interests to help keep them interested in what they are writing about. 
• Play word games and do puzzles together. Games and puzzles such as crosswords, tongue twisters and word puzzles help build your child’s knowledge of words, spelling, thinking and planning skills. 
• Start a blog or build a website using a free website builder about a family interest. Find a topic you’re both interested in. 

Write for a reason 

Ways to encourage your child to write:

• Suggest your child is responsible for the weekly shopping list, equipment list for weekends away and holidays, task lists for the week. 
• Encourage your child to write to others through emails, texts, messages on apps with parental controls turned on. It will help if some of what your child writes about is for others. 
• Short stories or a blog can help them to write about their experiences and their own feelings about things that have happened at school, in their family, on the marae, in the world, at sports events and on TV. 
• Report on a new baby or pet addition to the family. This might be a slide show, digital scrapbook or message to wider whānau members. 
• Make an argument in writing for a special request, for example, a trip, event, present and so on.
• Draw up written contracts for agreed jobs; for example, 'Every day I will… (make my bed, do one lot of dishes) and when I complete the contract, I can choose…'. 

Talk about your child's writing 

• Talk about ideas and information they are going to write about. Talk about experiences, diagrams, graphs, photos, treasures and taonga, waiata, pictures, whakapapa and material that your child is planning to use for school. Discussing the information and main ideas can help their planning for writing and their understanding, too. 
• Share enjoyment of their writing. Read and talk about the writing that your child does. Give praise for things they have done well and say what you liked and why. This all supports their learning. 
• Play with words. Thinking of interesting words and discussing new ones can help increase the words your child uses when they write. Look words up in an online dictionary to find out more about what they mean. Talk to family and whānau members to learn more about the background and the whakapapa | origins of the words. 
• Share your own writing with your child, for example, lists, planning for family events, song lyrics or letters and messages. You can help them to see that you too use writing for different purposes. 

Maths at home 

Talk together and have fun with numbers and patterns 

Help your child: 

• multiply 2 and 3-digit numbers, like 29 × 36 
• use rounding and estimating to check the answer to their calculations 
• find percentages in shops or online sales – talk about how much they would have to pay if an item is 50% off or half price
• talk about the phases of the moon and link these to the best times for fishing or planting
• talk about the patterns in the night sky – summer and winter. What changes and why?
• talk about where the data in a graph might have come from.

Use easy, everyday activities 

Involve your child in: 

• helping at the supermarket – look for the best buy between different brands of the same item and different sizes of the same item, for example, toilet paper, cans of spaghetti, bottles of milk 
• working out how many servings we could get from a bottle of juice, packet of pasta and so on
• looking at the nutrition table on food labels to see how much fat, sugar and salt it contains, and deciding on the healthiest choice 
• reading other tables, for example, TV schedule, events or activities schedules
• practising times tables – check with your child or their teacher which tables you could help them with
• on a journey by estimating how far away, and how long it might take to get to your destination. 

For wet afternoons, school holidays and weekends 

Get together with your child and: 

• play card and board games using guessing and checking 
• play games with dice and talk about how likely it is to roll a certain number 
• cook or make a pizza, working out who likes what toppings, making and cooking it, and making sure the pizza is shared fairly; make a paper or cardboard container to hold a piece of pizza to take for lunch 
• mix a drink for the family by measuring cordial, fruit and water 
• make kites or manu aute using a variety of shapes and materials. How high can it go, how long can it fly for? 
• make a whānau | family tree or whakapapa that includes the number of cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents and their relationships to you 
• plan out the holidays. Look at each day’s fun time, kai time, TV time, helping time, family time and bedtime 
• plan to make bead necklaces and friendship bracelets; calculate the cost of the materials, the length of stringing material 
• play outdoor games such as frisbee, touch rugby, kilikiti, cricket, soccer, bowls 
• do complicated jigsaw puzzles 
• explain to a family or whānau member how to do origami | paper folding
• go on scavenger hunts, make a map with clues and see who can get there first. 

Download the year 6 resources