It is well known in the literacy field that students who know how writers organise their ideas and present them in fiction and non-fiction have higher achievement in reading comprehension and writing (Calfee & Patrick, 1995; Dymock & Nicholson, 2012; McLachlan, Nicholson, Fielding-Barnsley, Mercer, & Ohi, 2013). On the other hand there is little research in New Zealand on this topic and this study will address this gap. In the study, 150 year 5/6 children in two primary schools were randomly assigned to text structure teaching, a treatment control group, or a no-treatment control group. Children were taught either text structure strategies or math (for the treatment control group) three days a week in one hour lessons for 10 weeks. Teaching was in small groups by trained tutors. Tutored students completed weekly quizzes related to the texts they studied and a writing task where they had to summarise the main points of a fiction or non-fiction text. Children were assessed using normed tests prior to the training and immediately at the end of the training programme. The prediction was that training in text structure for the experimental group would produce better reading and writing than for the two control groups.