YEAR 6 GUIDE · PHASE 2
A parent and teacher guide to Year 6 of the refreshed NZ maths curriculum — what’s taught, how to spot readiness, and how to help at home.
🎯Year 6 closes Phase 2 — the tying-it-together year. Fractions, decimals and percentages become one connected system, and the order of operations brings grown-up rules to calculation. Remember the golden rule of the refreshed curriculum: it's progression-based — children move on when they're ready, not on a birthday. Treat year levels as a guide only.
Children meet square and cube numbers (and the ² ³ notation), extend factor pairs to 12 × 12, and learn the order of operations — brackets first, then × and ÷, then + and −. Decimals reach thousandths, and the year's big idea is conversion: swapping fluently between fractions, decimals and percentages, and finding a percentage of an amount (10%, 20%, 25%, 50%, 75%) — including finding the whole from a part. Division of big numbers handles remainders as fractions or decimals, and in algebra children plot growing patterns on the coordinate plane.
✅ Signs your child is ready to move on
Write 3 + 4 × 2 and let them be the judge: which operation has the right of way? One disputed expression a week keeps the rule sharp.
'30% off $60 — what do we pay?' Then the reverse: 'the sale price is $42, what was it before?' Both directions are Year 6 skills.
1/4 = 0.25 = 25%. Three ways to say the same thing — collect the whole family on the fridge and quiz at random.
Chess boards, tiled floors, waffle irons. 'How many little squares?' Square numbers stick when they're seen, not memorised.
Sports timing apps show 12.847 seconds — perfect thousandths practice. Who improved, and by how much?
Every Year 6 mystery on Kiwi123 practises one focus skill from this year, inside a whodunit — so the maths practice feels like detective work, not drill. Browse the Year 6 mysteries → Or see everything in Phase 2 (Years 4–6).
Every Year 6 mystery practises one skill from this year inside a whodunit maths activity. The first ones are free — no account needed.
Open the Year 6 mysteries →