Te reo Māori challenge in 2025: Story starter card kupu

January is a great time to set yourself a little bit of a challenge for the coming year. Push yourself a little to learn something new.

I was trying to think of something that kiddo and I could do to add some more kupu Māori to our vocabularies, maybe a word of the day, or something when I realised that the answer was sitting in our games box in the form of the set of library story starter cards I bought for us a couple of years ago.

Christchurch City Libraries story starter cards come in a set of 60 ($19 a box at a library near you!) and each has a different word (mostly nouns) in English and te reo Māori along with an illustration - they're supposed to be used as prompts to create your own story with, but they can also function as flashcards for language learners. So in our house we're doing one card a week, chosen at random ("Pick a card, any card!") as a way of learning new kupu, albeit at a fairly slow, easy pace. There are 52 weeks in the year and 60 cards, so maybe we'll do some extras during school holidays?

So far in 2025 we have learned "papawīra" (skateboard) and "hīkoi taiao" (nature walk). With each kupu we'll chat about how it sounds (whether we think it might be a transliteration eg. wīra=wheel), whether we recognise any parts of compound words (we spotted "taiao" (nature) as a word we use in one of our karakia for kai, and "hīkoi" has been relevant recently), and if there are things about the kupu we're not sure of we can check in with Te Aka online Māori dictionary, which can also be helpful for pronunciation as all entries have sound files you can listen to. I'm also making an attempt to (somewhat inelegantly) wedge our weekly word into sentences "I bet this trip to the dairy would be faster on a papawīra", "does mowing the lawn count as a hīkoi taiao?"

I haven't gone so far as to jump out at my child at unexpected moments belting "He aha te kupu Māori mo skateboard?!*" but just know I'm thinking about it.

You can, of course, also use the cards for their intended purpose, as a way of making up fun and unpredictable stories as a form of non-screen time school holiday entertainment.

Check out the video with Justice below to get an idea of how you can use them.

Other ways to include some language learning in your year

• Library resources for te reo Māori learning
• Local te reo Māori courses
• 100 Māori words every New Zealander should know 
• Get a kupu o te rā (word of the day) to your phone

*What is the Māori word for skateboard?