Learning At Home

Learning at home is valuable, rich and fun for children. Here are some ideas to help you to make the most of this opportunity. To view other years, visit Supporting Your Child's Learning.

Below are some great ideas to help your child to learn at home.

For more information on each subject area, visit Parents Education.

Year 3

Reading at home

Make reading fun

• Have fun sing alongs to karaoke songs
• Play board games together
• Read to your child every day. You can use your first language
• Have a pile of reading materials available – library books (non-fiction and fiction), kids’ cookery books, simple timetables, newspapers and magazines, catalogues 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 card games (you can make the cards yourself) and board games together.

Here are some tips -

When they are reading, your child will be working at solving unfamiliar words by themself. If they need help you could ask them to work their way across the word looking for things they know that might help. At this level, reading involves bringing everything they know together to solve problems and build understanding. If they can’t work it out – tell them and carry on with reading.

If you or your child starts to feel stressed by what they’re reading, take a break and read the rest of the story aloud yourself – keep it fun.

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’
• Work together on the small word games found in the children’s section (or word section) of the newspaper
• 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 tïpuna (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

Here's a tip - keep writing fun and use any excuse to encourage your child to write about anything, any time.

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
• name the number that is 10 more or 10 less than before or after a number up to 100
• make patterns when counting in groups (skip counting) forwards and backwards, starting with different numbers (eg 13, 23, 33, 43…, …43, 33, 23, 13)
• try making different types of patterns by drumming, clapping, stamping, dancing or drawing patterns that repeat
• find out the ages of family or whānau members
• do addition and subtraction problems in their heads using facts to 20 eg 10 + 4, 15 – 7
• use groups of 10 that add to 100 eg 50 + 50, 30 + 70.

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

For more information on each learning area, visit Parents Education

Year 4

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.

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.

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

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.