Kia ora!

I have been reading a great article about lawnmower parents and felt it timely to share the main comments from this. The article says, “Lawnmower parents are those who instead of preparing children for challenges, mow obstacles down so their kids won’t experience them in the first place. Obviously most of us don’t like to see our children struggle, but in raising children who have experienced minimal struggle, we are not creating a happier generation of kids. We are creating a generation that has no what idea what to do when they actually encounter struggle. A generation who panics or shuts down at the mere idea of failure. If we eliminate all struggle in children’s younger years, they will not arrive at adulthood magically equipped to deal with failure. Indeed, childhood is when they learn these skills. If we want our children to be successful, healthy adults, we must teach them how to process through their own challenges, respond to adversity, and advocate for themselves.” I encourage you all to think about when you have been that lawnmower parent and to reflect on whether it was indeed the right thing to do. Building our children’s self-efficacy and self-belief is important, as there is good research around the link between self-efficacy and success in life.

We are lucky to have such great schools around us in our Kahui Ako l Community of Learning. Two of these schools, Westlake Boys and Westlake Girls, have amazing choirs who came and performed for our students recently. These choirs, Choralation and Cantare, have just been at The Big Sing National Finals and did extremely well. A number of ex-Milford students are in these choirs and we love seeing how our students do as they progress through their schooling past our doors.

Congratulations to our ski team who came 4th in the North Island Ski Champs. They skied really well and were the top North Shore school. Congratulations to Manaaki Springgay, Hallston Springgay, Sienna Meikle, Mia Meikleand Charles Xiong.

As mentioned in last week’s newsletter, next week we have both Te Wiki o te Reo Māori Week, and Literacy Week. For Literacy Week, we have visits from authors, a book swap and a character parade. The book character day is on Thursday, and the children come to school dressed in a costume that depicts a character from a book. Many of the children are already busily discussing their costumes!

A reminder to bring in the sponsorship money for the Kiwi Quiz-a-thon. The PTA would like this money to be brought in by next Friday please.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Ngā mihi nui