Developed in partnership with Education Services Australia

The Australian Curriculum sets the goal for what all students should learn as they progress through their school life. Skills in the Year 5-6 curriculum include:

• changing, adding and removing words to make texts easier to read.

It’s easy to help your child practise this skill as part of everyday life – just use these simple ideas.

Spot redundancies

As your child’s vocabulary expands and they focus on adding interest to their writing, they might start to use words in ways that don’t add any meaning – eg scream loudly instead of scream, or very unique instead of unique, or free giveaway instead of giveaway. Redundancies such as these often go unnoticed when we are speaking, but it’s best to avoid them in writing.

To help your child learn to avoid the redundancy trap:

• notice when other people use redundancies, and ask your child to suggest better wording
• search on the internet for lists of common redundancies
• as a game, challenge each other to create sentences with as many redundancies as possible
  
  After watching the evening sunset at the seaside beach, we got home at nine pm at night.

Go online

For online reinforcement, Finish the story: bushfire and Finish the story: boat will give your child practice at:

• editing text to add interest to a narrative. 

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