Ideas for Writing at Home (from Ministry of Education)
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 about a family interest. Find a topic you’re both interested in and set up your own blog.
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. Use your first language – this helps your child’s learning, too.
Write for a reason
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 - emails, letters, texts, postcards. It will help if some of what your child writes about is for others
- Short stories or a journal – on paper or on a computer – 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, scrapbook, page on the computer
- Make an argument in writing for a special request – trip, event, present etc
- Draw up written contracts for agreed jobs; eg Every day I will…(make my bed, do one lot of dishes, and when I complete the contract I can choose…).
Here's a tip - keep writing fun and use any excuse you can think of to encourage your child to write about anything, anytime.
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 work. 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 the dictionary or on the Internet 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 – lists, planning for family events, song lyrics or letters and emails. You can help them to see that you too use writing for different purposes.
Here's a tip - talk about what your child writes. Be interested. Use it as a way of starting conversations. Listen to their opinion, even if you don’t agree with it.