Māori are the indigenous people of New Zealand. Since British colonial settlement in the early 1800s, Māori children have been predominantly educated in an English- speaking system dominated by colonial governance. In this institution, Māori children have been constructed as deficient learners, primarily in relation to a colonial curriculum taught in English and an assessment regime developed with monolingual and mono-cultural English children. This article, which critically challenges the deficit discourse, outlines the ways in which Māori and English languages co-exist in a fluid stream across the curriculum in a Christchurch classroom in order to scaffold educational achievement in learning to read English, for Māori children.