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Oral language#

Ideas to support oral language at home 

With your child, you could:

  • share favourite stories or movies using interesting words – change the pace and tone of your speech to create suspense, joy, sadness, or excitement
  • talk about a recent family event, holiday or activity
  • watch videos, read books, and listen to audiobooks about interesting topics and discuss the meaning of new words
  • talk about their learning and progress.

The teacher will focus on expanding your child's oral language skills. For example, by the end of the year your child will be able to:

  • tell stories with expression and different tones of voice to add excitement for listeners
  • plan and share a presentation that is clearly organised, so the audience can make connections between ideas, and that uses evidence to support what they say
  • participate in discussions by checking understanding through rewording and repeating what others have said and asking questions – for example "​​so, do you mean that you agree that …?"
  • use discussion and self-reflection to set specific learning goals and plan steps to achieve them and find solutions to challenges.

Reading#

Ideas to support reading at home 

With your child, you could expand on what they are reading. For example:

  • imagine what the characters look like
  • what they think is going to happen next
  • what the important messages are in the text and how they know that
  • make connections with similar topics.

Help them read and understand difficult words by looking for smaller words or word parts in longer words and looking up meanings in a dictionary if you need to. 

You could:

  • visit the library and let them choose books related to their interests and things they are learning about at school
  • find books that have been made into movies or TV programmes – this can help them to discover different ways to tell the same story if they read the 'stories' they have watched
  • encourage them to read books aloud to family members (siblings, aunty, grandma and cousins)
  • read to them no matter how old they are – they can understand more challenging information than they can read.

The teacher will focus on expanding your child's reading skills. For example, by the end of the year your child will be able to:

  • use their knowledge of letters, sounds, and word parts to read words with 2 or more syllables
  • read longer texts independently, as well as those that are related to their interests
  • use information in the text, knowledge of word parts that have a meaning, and knowledge from other subjects and topics to work out the meaning of new words and phrases in Year 5 texts
  • recognise and describe the main differences between types of texts – for example, stories, articles, poems, plays – identify the main message or idea in a text, and summarise the key details that support this
  • use the evidence that is explicitly stated and evidence that is hinted at, as well as their prior knowledge, to extend their understanding of the text and the author’s purpose
  • make connections between what they are reading and their own knowledge, experiences, cultural understandings, values, and practices
  • share opinions and feelings about ideas in texts, and listen to and build on what others say, noticing the similarities and differences to their own response.

Texts for Year 5#

Books used during Year 5 will be a mixture of print and electronic oral, written, and visual fiction and non-fiction texts of different lengths. They will include poems, stories, plays, comics, articles, and instructions. These texts could include Level 3 School Journals.

Your child may bring books home. Often they will be books they have chosen from the school library. There are example books on the page below.

Reading books at home in Year 5

Writing#

Ideas to support writing at home 

With your child, you could:

  • help them write about their heroes, pets, sports events, ancestors, hobbies, and interests
  • help them to check what they have written, suggest ideas for improving their writing, and encourage them to share their work with family members
  • play word games and do puzzles together to help them learn more about words and spelling
  • help them to make a special book to write in or create a digital book of special events
  • write and send messages, invitations, thank you letters, or postcards to friends and family, as well as writing poems or stories for them
  • encourage them to write about their feelings and experiences in a diary, journal, or online blog.

If your child misses sounds in words, praise them for trying and encourage them to have another look at their writing.

The teacher will focus on expanding your child's writing skills. For example, by the end of the year your child will be able to:

  • handwrite longer pieces of writing easily
  • add an apostrophe correctly to show possession of more than 1 thing, which can sometimes mean placing the apostrophe before the 's' and sometimes after the 's' – for example, "the children's cat", "the boy's sister"
  • spell less common homophones correctly – for example, queue, cue; minor, miner; you, ewe
  • plan and write for a specific audience and purpose, making choices about the most appropriate style of writing and considering how different audiences might respond to their writing
  • use a range of sentence types and structures, avoiding too much repetition
  • use punctuation at the beginning and end of sentences correctly and consistently
  • write a range of texts including:
    • stories with descriptive words that help the reader see, hear, smell, taste, or feel what is happening in the story, and a conclusion that follows on from the events that have taken place
    • information reports with topic-related vocabulary, simple visuals to support understanding – for example, drawings, photos – and a conclusion that is related to the information
    • persuasive texts from their perspective, using the first person ('I'), facts and details to support their opinion, and a conclusion related to it
  • use computer programmes to create and edit texts that include a mix of words, images, and sound
  • make notes, organising key information into categories, to plan their writing
  • reread as they write, improving their choice of words and sentence and text structure, and fixing any mistakes in grammar or meaning
  • seek and respond to feedback about their writing from classmates and a wider audience.

Resource#

pdf thumbnailReading and writing at home - Year 5 NZ Curriculum
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