Kia ora whānau. This morning we had three of our contributing early childhood centres come to Milford School and enjoy a concert our school orchestra and Junior Kapa Haka put on for them. Our Year 0 and 1 children joined them and it was very special. These connections are important and really help the transition of the children from ECE to school. A huge thank you to Eugenie Middleton for arranging this and preparing our orchestra so well, and to the Year 6 students who lead the Junior Kapa Haka - they were impressive!

The Yummy sticker promotion is set to go again for 2022, time to get crunching and collecting stickers. Last year threw us all some curved balls, but this year we are excited to be celebrating our 25th anniversary of running this promotion for schools. Everything is basically the same as previous years, sticker charts are the same and available on our website. One thing you may find, is some Hailstone Hero apple bags. We had a wild spring storm hit us in Hawkes Bay, damaging a significant amount of our apple crop with hail. Although these look funny, they still taste yummy. The official cut-out is not on these bags, but you can collect the round bar-code sticker as 10 points. These are Yummy apples but branded Hailstone Heroes and available in both New World and Pak’n Saves.

Milford School have a vibrant and busy music department. We provide not only classroom music lessons but the opportunity for children to belong to many groups. To celebrate this, we are having an evening 'Music Extravaganza Concert' to showcase and share the student's talents.

We are thrilled with the effort and achievement of our students selling chocolate bars to raise money for the middle section of the playground. I would especially like to thank Bryn and his family for taking action in a different way! Bryn and his family made and sold a homemade product instead of the bars, and raised as much money as they would have if they had sold a box of chocolate bars. Thank you, Bryn, what a fantastic idea and a wonderful example of taking action! Ka nui te mihi.

It was NZ Maths week this week and we celebrated our love of maths with lots of fun activities. We had daily challenges, scavenger hunts, an ASB Getwise facilitator who worked with the Year 3-6 students on financial literacy, as well as the online activities from the Maths Week site. It was really lovely to see the buddy classes working together to solve the scavenger hunt. Here are some of the photos of Year 4 children helping our Year 1 children with the scavenger hunt. Real tuakana-teina in action!

Room 17 and Room 9 buddy class scavenger hunt! To celebrate NZ Maths Week, Room 17 and Room 9 enjoyed a scavenger hunt together. The big buddies helped the little buddies to read the questions and the little buddies sprinted around the school to find the answers. Some Year 4 students were surprised by how fast the Year 1's could run. It was an awesome experience for all the children.

Room 20 has enjoyed celebrating Math’s week! We have completed scavenger hunts, explored the Commonwealth Games through statistics, and created our own board games. Our favourite part was creating a life-sized snakes and ladders game, where we could be the human counters! We each had a turn at designing and colouring in our own number. We decided to create moveable snakes and ladders so that each game would be different. We are so excited to play snakes and ladders with our classmates!

Our buddy reading programme is back! Westlake Girls High School and Milford School have combined to promote and extend the love of reading in our children.

The Year one students' Unit of Inquiry is How We Express Ourselves. Room 16 ESOL students have been learning many new words they can use in speaking and writing. We are so lucky to have so many children who can express their feelings not only in English but in their mother tongue, too.

In Year 0/1 we have been learning about the Learner Profile Attribute of being a Communicator. Being a communicator means that we can share our ideas and express our feelings with others, and do so in many different ways. It also means that we listen to others share their thoughts and ideas. This week the certificate recipients are: Alex and Spencer (Room 18), Jason and Naomi (Room 13), Eilidh and Tessan (Room 14), Sona and George (Room 15), Mikaela and Derek (Room 16), and Laura and Ian (Room 17). Congratulations to all these wonderful learners.

The Gardening Club children got to enjoy some harvest from our garden this week. Our lovely parent helper Charlotte made a delicious pesto using the coriander from our garden. The children also harvested a few carrots from the garden, which we chopped up and dipped into the pesto.

On Monday, Milford School sent 8 children to the North Shore Regional Chess Tournament. Our two teams of 4 each came 12th and 19th out of 22. Congratulations to Adnan and Aarib Hussain who each reportedly won five of their 6 matches. A great time was had by all players and at chess club on Wednesday, a number of the players told me they learned a lot.

On Monday the Year 1 and 2 netball teams played their last games for the 2022 season. We are so proud of all of them, their commitment to the game and turning up each week, sometimes even braving the cold weather. The teachers, coaches and parents are also so impressed with the skills they've developed, the huge progress they've made and the excellent sportsmanship they displayed on the court every week. A special thank you to all the coaches and managers who have given up their time and effort to look after and train the teams each week. It is now time to return all the netball uniforms. Please send clean, washed uniforms to Mrs Smith in Room 16 over the next 2 weeks.

Last Wednesday 68 students went to Tough Guy & Gal held in Kumeu. There was excitement during the roll and everyone had on clean clothing! We packed up the cars and took to the motorways to get to Kumeu. On arrival, there was a buzz in the air! Students from schools across Auckland came together to run in the annual MUD RUN. Bibs were attached to all students, shoes taped on tight and nervousness started to creep in as the MC started to hype up all 1000+ students attending. Year 7/8 ran first, followed by Year 5/6 and then the Year 4 students. Following the run, students rushed to the showers and were awarded a medal AND a Hell Pizza Voucher! Well done all participants and hope to see you next year!

Last Thursday. six Rippa Rugby teams (Y3-6) took to Onewa Domain to compete in their last Rippa Festival for 2022. The weather was a stand-out, starting the day in a fog, opening to a blue-sky day. All Milford teams played hard, and fair and took out a few 'wins' (even though no formal scoring took place). A fabulous day to be had by all.

Children from our local Kindercare came for a visit this week to explore the school and to do some research into our worm farms. Our amazing Kaiarahi Esther introduced the children to our worms and explained how our worm farms work. The children were able to ask some great questions that Esther answered, so they learned a lot of new information such as the worms not liking the light, and that if one worm gets cut in half, both parts can stay alive and keep working! Thank you for visiting Kindercare, we enjoyed showing you Milford School. *No worms were cut in half in the making of this article. We just believed Esther because she's very clever!

See attached enrolment information for Skids before and after school programme, including their weekly activity plan for Term 3.

Run by Young Guns Skate School at Takapuna Primary School | 23 Auburn Street, Takapuna on Thursday afternoons.

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