Dear Parents and Carers

We have had a super term so far and I hope you have managed to be part of the excellent events across the school. In particular, the swimming carnivals have been lots of fun. We are looking forward to the Carnival for Halls Head and are hoping for a lovely day and temperatures a little cooler than those that we had for the swimming carnival for Secondary and Primary!!!!

In this edition I wanted to talk about how tough the job of parenting is these days. We are all so busy working, running crazy schedules and trying our very best to support and raise happy children and it isn’t easy. One aspect I want to raise is in the area of technology. On one hand it is a blessing and at the same time is such a difficult aspect to manage from a parent perspective. Monitoring your children’s online activity can almost be a full time job in itself. While we know that children will make mistakes it is so important to monitor their activity as they are operating in an adult online world, and yet they are still children and this can be fraught with danger. Young people are far more brave in the online environment as it can seem almost fictional life rather than realising they are dealing with real life people behind the technology. Children can become caught up in situations so quickly and often lack the developmental ability to know how to get out of it. Parents, I encourage you to set boundaries, monitor what your children are doing, saying and posting online, look at their online history and make sure you are comfortable with what sites they are looking at and posting on. Encourage boundaries for where devices are kept at night, charged and avoid letting children use devices in their bedrooms as children cannot easily regulate their use. Technology is not a toy and we need to do all that we can to protect our young people. At school we run a range of cyber-information and educate children about the use and how to protect themselves but we need this to be a home and school approach.

I know that being a parent is the most rewarding role we can have but it is also at times, the hardest and scariest role we can have too. We are blessed to be having Dr Justin Coulson come and speak to our families on the 13 March about ‘9 ways we can build resilient kids’. He is an international speaker and parenting expert and I strongly encourage you to register online here. It is not every day we can have someone with the expertise and credentials like Justin so book your tickets and do not miss this event. After all, we all need as much support in raising our children in this day and age.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Mrs Gray
Principal