As I walk through the school every day, I am thrilled by the number of children (and adults) who greet me with a cheery greeting and a smile. If ever you need a ‘pick me up’, just visit our Prep area. They make you feel like a rockstar. What a way to spend your day!

Children enter life with an inherent capacity to laugh, smile, play and generally make fun and light of life. Their sense of humour is then cultivated by how they experience their social environment - their school, family, neighbourhood and social groupings.

If teachers and parents can live with a happy perspective to their lives and encourage and model their children to do the same, those children will manage life’s challenges with far less stress.

An interesting study, conducted by St Thomas Hospital in London, has found that your sense of humour has nothing to do with your genes and everything to do with your upbringing - it depends on the way you were raised.  It would then appear to be the case that humour is an essential tool in being a parent or a teacher. It ranks alongside common sense and that ‘gut feeling’ we all experience from time to time.

Russel Conwell offers the following initiatives:

So the challenge is for we, adults, to keep ourselves and our children smiling and, on occasion, laughing, in spite of the world around us, especially in these difficult times.

So, smile a mile….

That’s the Spirit Way!

Paul Martin