Talk and conversations with your children around the school values of Respect, Resilience and Integrity has value for all ages. Discussing where you have to show these values in your everyday life and recognising these traits in famous people they may know about. These values are the foundations of the attitudes and behaviours needed to be a successful learner and we need to teach our children what they look like just as much as teaching them to read, write and do maths.
Discussing the school graduate profile of being confident, being creative, being a critical thinker and being connected is also valuable. These are the traits we would love our students to display and thinking about what a confident learner does or how a connected learner behaves can have a positive impact on their overall approach to learning.
Reading
The single most important thing with reading at this age is to read and talk about the reading.
- 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.
Writing
At this age it is important to give your child a reason for writing
- 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.
- 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.
- Writing about their heroes, sports events, hobbies and interests helps your child to stay interested in what they are writing about
- Do code crackers, word puzzles, crosswords, word finds – these are all fun to do together
- Make up a story or think of a legend and act it out with costumes and music. Write down the names of the characters
Maths
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.
- Telling the time – o’clock, ½, ¼ past
- 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).