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Reading at home

Read and talk together

• Get your child to tell you about what they are reading. Who is their favourite character and why? Is there anyone like that in your family? What do they think is going to happen? What have they learnt from their reading? Does it remind them of any of their own experiences?

• Help your child with any words they don’t understand – look them up together in the dictionary if you need to

• Read recipes, instructions, manuals, maps, diagrams, signs and emails. It will help your child to understand that words can be organised in different ways on a page, depending on what it’s for

• Read junk mail – your child could compare costs, make their own ‘advertisements’ by cutting up junk mail or come up with clever sentences for a product they like.

Here’s a tip – talk a lot to your child while you are doing things together. Use the language that works best for you and your child.

Read with others

• If your child has chosen something to read that is too hard at the moment, take turns and read it together

• Reading to younger brothers or sisters, whānau or grandparents will give your child an opportunity to practise reading out loud

• Encourage other family members to read to and with your child – Aunty, Grandma, Koro

• Playing board games and card games is important, too

• Choose games that everyone wants to play – make them challenging, not too easy.

Here’s some tips –

Keep the magic of listening to a good story alive by reading either made up, retold or read-aloud stories to your child – with lots of excitement through the use of your voice!

When they are reading, the most common difficulty your child is likely to have is working out the meaning of new words, phrases and expressions. To do this your child will use their knowledge of words and word patterns (eg prefixes, suffixes and root words) to help build meaning. You may need to remind your child to read back and forward for clues to help their understanding of what they are reading. Talk with your child about the meaning.

Read...

• Get your child to choose a book that you can read to them (listening to you read helps them with their reading)

• Encourage your child to retell favourite stories or parts of stories in their own words.

Here’s a tip – help your child link stories to their own life. Remind them about what they have done when a similar thing happens in the story.

Websites

Mathematics at home

Talk together and have fun with numbers and patterns

Help your child to:

• find and connect numbers around your home and neighbourhood – phone numbers, clocks, letterboxes, road signs, signs showing distance

• count forwards and backwards (starting with numbers like 998, 999, 1,000, 1,001, 1,002 then back again)

• make patterns when counting – forwards and backwards, starting with different numbers (73, 83, 93, 103… or 118, 108, 98, 88…)

• explore patterns through drumming, clapping, stamping, dancing find out the ages and birth dates of family and whānau see patterns in the numbers in their times tables.

Here’s a tip – being positive about mathematics is really important for your child’s learning – even if you didn’t enjoy it or do well at it yourself at school.

Use easy, everyday activities

Involve your child in:

• making lunch or a meal for a party or a hui – make sandwiches in different shapes. Can they cut their sandwich in half? Can they cut the other sandwich in half a different way?

• helping at the supermarket – choose items to weigh – how many apples/bananas weigh a kilo? Look for the best buy between different makes of the same items (eg blocks of cheese) – check on the amount of sugar or salt per serving

• telling the time – o’clock, ½ , ¼ past

• deciding how much money you will need to put into the parking meter and what time you will need to be back before the meter expires

• thinking about how many telephone numbers they can remember – talk about what they do to help them remember the series of numbers

• reading together – help them look for numbers and mathematics ideas

• looking for shapes and numbers in newspapers, magazines, junk mail, art (like carvings and sculpture).

Here’s a tip – mathematics is an important part of everyday life and there are lots of ways you can make it fun for your child.

For wet afternoons/school holidays/weekends

Get together with your child and:

• play card and board games that use guessing and checking

• look at junk mail – which is the best value? Ask your child what they would buy if they had $10/$100/$1,000 to spend

• do complicated jigsaw puzzles

• cook or bake – use measuring cups, spoons (½ and ¼ teaspoon) and scales

• collect boxes – undo and see if you can make them up again or make it into something else

• make paper darts and change the weight so that they fly differently, work out which is the best design

• create a repeating pattern (eg kōwhaiwhai patterns) to fill up a page or decorate a card

• play mathematics “I Spy” – something that is ½ a km away, something that has 5 parts hide something from each other and draw a map or hide several clues – can you follow the map or the clues and find it?

• do skipping ropes/elastics – how long will it take to jump 20 times?

Here’s a tip – the way your child is learning to solve mathematics problems may be different to when you were at school. Get them to show you how they do it and support them in their learning.

Credit: SchoolKit @ Home

WATCH: The short film Adrift produced by the University of Hertfordshire.

TALK: Is it possible to live on the back of an animal? Justify your answer. If you had to live on the back of an animal, which one would you choose and why?

DO: Draw your own home on an animals back. Think about all the different things you would need for your home. Who lives there? Is it just you, or are you living with others?

Credit: SchoolKit @ Home

WATCH: This video of kids trying food from different children's books

TALK: Would you try any of the foods in the video? Explain why for each one? What is the most delicious thing you've ever eaten? How about the most disgusting? Would you rather eat a delicious meal that looks disgusting or a disgusting meal that looks delicious?

DO: Create a menu for a restaurant, filled with the most disgusting dishes you can imagine. Think of all the foods you hate and the worst possible combinations of them.

CREDIT:  SCHOOL KIT@ HOME

WATCH: The live webcams set up in Victoria Zoo. Can you spot any of the animals inside their enclosures?

TALK: About the animal enclosures, what is different about them? What is the same? Why would there need to be differences in each one? What do animals need? Is it the same as humans?

DO: Become a zookeeper and choose a new animal to join your zoo. Research their natural habitat - what does it look like? What do they need to survive? What do they eat? What will make them happy? Use your research to create the perfect enclosure to meet their needs.

Now write a story/narrative about your Tiny Dragon.

Writing at home

Write for fun

• Writing about their heroes, sports events, tīpuna (ancestors), hobbies and interests helps your child to stay interested in what they are writing about

• Help your child to leave messages in sand on the beach, send a message in a bottle, do code crackers, word puzzles, crosswords, word finds – these are all fun to do together

• Make up a story or think of a pakiwaitara (legend) and act it out with costumes and music. Write down the names of the characters or tīpuna (ancestors)

• If you or someone in your family has a computer, encourage your child to use it to write, email and publish or print for pleasure (emails, birthday cards, poems, jokes, letters, pictures with captions). Or you could use a computer at the library.

Here’s a tip – keep writing fun and use any excuse you can think of to encourage your child to write about anything, any time.

Talk about your child’s writing

• Get your child to talk about their writing and share it

• Cut out words and letters to make stories, codes, poems, puzzles and more…

• Play word games together

• 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 the dictionary or on the Internet or talk with family/whānau to find out more about where the words come from.

Here’s a tip – talk about what your child writes. Be interested. If you don’t understand what their story is about, ask them to tell you more about it. Use questions they will want to answer.

Write for a reason

• Get your child to help write the shopping list, invitation lists for family events, menus for special dinners, thank-you cards when someone does something nice

• Postcards are a good size for a sentence or two and they are cheap to post, too. Have a special place to keep your child’s writing at home (notice board, fridge, folder). You might frame a piece of writing and hang it up, too.

Here’s a tip – be a great role model. Show your child that you write for all sorts of reasons. Let them see you enjoying writing. Write to them sometimes, too. You can use your first language – this helps your child’s learning, too.