Dear Parents and families,

Welcome to Term 4. Our final term is always a busy and very exciting time on our school calendar and there is much to look forward to. It has been great to see our students returning from the break in a focused manner and to see the sense of energy and purpose around our school as people turn their attention to all of the tasks, opportunities and events that happen in Term 4.  

Principal Teaching Classes 2023
This term staff will be organising classes for 2023. Your child’s current principal teacher is in the best position to formulate classes for next year. Our teachers take on board a number of considerations when placing students. Our goal is to create the most equitable classes possible, taking into account gender, learning ability, social connections etc. Whilst parents have one child to consider (in a given class), we have approximately 560 children to consider next year, and so decisions need to be suitable for the majority. We have dedicated, hardworking teachers who are collectively responsible for all our children.  No matter what grade or class – each child in this school will be taught by quality teachers in a school culture of high expectations.

Teachers use a variety of methods to group children in order to maximise learning – and the focus is always on the individual (personalising the learning).  At Reece High School we have been thoughtful about developing opportunities for students to interact and learn with one another – both within their own class and in conjunction with another class or across grades (7-10).  These observations inform us about the conditions that best suit a particular student to learn: which learning style they have; who they are friends with; as well as who they learn best with. We consider all these factors when placing children in classes for the following year. 

Please understand, teachers will make the best decision for all children in the school - including what we believe is in the educational and social/emotional well-being of the majority of children.  We are unable to accommodate personal requests because accommodating everyone’s personal wishes will not support what is best for all children.  If there is any other information that you think your child’s teacher might need to take into account before we start creating classes, can you please talk to the teacher prior to the 5^th of November. 

Realising Potential Choices 2023
Students in Grades 7-9 will soon begin the process of choosing their Realising Potential choices for 2023. Students will have the opportunity to study one subject for 2 blocks each week as well as 2 subjects for 1 block each week. The 1 block subjects will continue to run as half year subjects thus allowing the students the opportunity to experience more options within a school year.

Course booklets for the subjects will be released soon and students will be able to access these online. If you would like to see the subject offerings, your child can show you on TEAMS.

Initially students will be asked to indicate the option subjects they wish to study in 2023. From these preliminary choices, final subject offerings will be placed in an online survey for students to complete.

Over the next week our RP teachers will be talking to all grade 7, 8 and 9 students about the RP offerings for 2023. This will allow them to ask clarifying questions and make an informed decision in relation to their choices.

Road Works

The Devonport City Council have included the following information on their Facebook Page:

Road closure - William Street, 24 October to 25 November 2022
Works will be undertaken on William Street (between Valley Road and Middle Road) between 7am on Monday, 24 October 2022 until 5pm Friday, 25 November 2022, for the conduct of pavement, kerb and driveway reconstruction.
We ask motorists to comply with all traffic management signs and to consider alternative routes to avoid delays.
We apologise for any inconvenience these works may cause and thank you in advance for your patience.

This obviously has an impact on the amount of traffic travelling past our school, particularly at drop off and pick up times. We ask that all students practise safely crossing the road by using the available crossing guard.

Keep your family safe online

Being online allows your family to learn, socialise and have fun. But it can be challenging to ensure you are all safe.

This Cyber Security Awareness Month (October), learn how to improve your digital awareness, identify scams and protect your family when online.

The Cybermarvel website is full of useful resources for parents and carers, including:

• free webinars on digital technologies and mental health
• videos on how to keep your child safe online
• podcast episodes on talking with your child about online safety
• device management tips
• plus plenty more!

Well Done! 

I would like to commend students on the following highlights:

• Well done to students who have provided support as part of our Community Connections programs at the start of this term. It makes us very proud to hear such great feedback about the way students conduct themselves, including being proactive in finding ways to help others and showing genuine care and consideration for our community. A top effort!

• Congratulations to the teams of students who represented the school at the KAKKA Challenge held at Don College on Thursday. There was some strong competition and it was great to hear how much students enjoyed the day. Well done!

• We have had almost 40 Grade 9 students who have been prepared to put themselves forward as student leaders for 2022. The Prefect Election process has now started and students will have the opportunity to run challenges and activities for fellow students at lunch times. I’d like to thank all of the students for the effort that they have put into this process and for their genuine enthusiasm in wanting to contribute to the school as leaders. We look forward to sharing further details as this progresses. 

• The Transition Program to support our incoming Grade 6 students is now well underway. This term, we welcome our feeder primary school students, as well as students who have been accepted as part of the Out Of Area Application process, to participate in a Taster Day. We have been impressed with the Respect, Responsibility, Best Effort and Inclusiveness demonstrated by the Grade 6 students and we look forward to having them as part of our school community in 2023.

 Professional Learning Day

A reminder that next Friday 4^th November is a Professional Learning Day (student free). Staff will be using this valuable time for their learning with a focus on reviewing our work from this year and planning for 2023. Students will no doubt enjoy a long weekend, with the Monday following being the Recreation Day Holiday! 

Term 4 will be a busy term for Grade 7 students, with many learning opportunities and activities being planned.  In Maths, students have been learning about theoretical and experimental probability.  This involved assigning probabilities to real life events and completing experiments to determine favourable outcomes.  In Science, students are learning about classification systems and now understand that there are seven levels including kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species.  Students have also learnt how to classify items into a dichotomous key; next students will conduct experiments in the Science Lab to classify powders.

English lessons this term have seen students interacting and engaging with the media and news in a variety of formats. Students have been learning about the structural features found in news and applying them to a news article they are writing. In HASS, students are busy completing their liveability assessment for their most recent HASS unit. Students have been proposing, designing and reviewing ways to make a certain 'place' in Devonport more liveable. 

Activities this term include a 2-day Athletics carnival and planning is currently underway for a Grade 7 camp.  Students have been given details about the camp to share with parents and guardians.  If you have any questions, please contact the School Office (64208100) or email your child’s principal teacher.

Grade 8 Science have been working hard on their Science Investigations for our annual Grade 8 Science Fair. Each group has had to develop their own scientific question and experiment to conduct.

Judges from UTAS came to judge 20 of our grade’s projects as part of the UTAS Science and Engineering Awards. They were very impressed with the calibre of the Grade 8’s work.

The Grade 7s also came to check out the Grade 8’s work and voted for their favourite project.

The winners of our internal Reece High Science Fair were 3 students from 8A, Addison Alexander, Molly Davey and Amber Kelly-Cubit for their investigation on whether music affects a person's blood pressure.

On the 4^th of November, the results from the UTAS judges will be posted online and we will be able to see how our students went!

Good luck to all our entrants!

Grade 9 students have returned from holidays ready to tackle a very busy Term 4. This term will see some students nominate themselves to become a prefect for 2023. Interested students have already completed an initial expression of interest form and, over the coming weeks, will move through the next stages of this process.

During the first two weeks of term, potential nominees have run lunchtime activities for other students in the school. This has given them a chance to gain some insight into what may be required of them next year, as well as provide them with an opportunity to introduce themselves to other students within the school. In week four they will submit their official nomination form, which requires them to address the four school values of Respect, Best Effort, Responsibility, and Inclusiveness. This form also needs to be signed off by their principal teacher, a member of leadership (Mr Murray, Mr Franks, or Mrs Hess), their HPE teacher, and their two block RP teacher. They will create a profile page to be displayed in the canteen and be interviewed for a video shown to classes before voting and the announcement of the 2023 prefect board in week seven.

10B and D were finally able to complete their Resilience Training last week. It is always a tough day where students face a multitude of challenges that put them out of their comfort zones. The lessons they learn about themselves are invaluable: persevering when something is tough, communicating with others effectively, and working together to achieve a desired goal. Well done to those students who made the most of the opportunity.

Term 4 is always a very busy term for Grade 10 students. Please make yourself familiar with the dates in the Grade 10 calendar. 

This term the prefects have a number of things going on and we are really excited to finish the year off in a positive way.

A big focus for us in the first part of the term will be getting organised for our role on the upcoming Grade 7 camp. We are so excited that this is going ahead and can't wait to spend two days with all of the Grade 7s, ensuring they have a great camp experience, like we did when we started high school. We will be running a range of activities across the two days as well as each being part of a tribe. We can’t wait!!

Our personal projects will come to an end early this term with most prefects now finished, or very close to finished. This has been a great opportunity for us to develop and see through an initiative of our choosing. We will share all of the different projects in an upcoming newsletter.

Finally we will be running the annual “Year In Review” Assembly. This is always a highlight of the school year where we look back on everything that has happened in a very light hearted way. We’re hopeful that we may even get an update on how last year's farmer (Mr Robinson) and his “wife” (Mr Connors), the winner of Farmer Wants a Wife, have got on in the last year!

Song Contest – As Almost Eurovision Experience

What a show! As most of school community would be aware, late last term our school production Song Contest – An Almost Eurovision Experience was staged. Over 1000 people came to see and support our show, with everyone voting for a different winner each show. We were extremely impressed with the resilience and adaptability our students showed along the way due to several shows having to be rescheduled. The show was full of energy, colour and fun with students embracing the spirit from the countries they represented. It was a unique project for the students and staff to work on and we were impressed with how our audiences embraced the interactive nature of the performance. A big thank you to all staff and students who went above and beyond and contributed to the huge project spanning 3 terms.

Well done to one of our prefects, Blaze, for his effort in organising activities this week around creating awareness around mental health and raising funds for the Black Dog institute. On Wednesday senior school students participated in the “One Foot Forward Walk for Mental Health,” a nationwide initiative as part of Mental Health Week.

Thursday we saw a pizza and powerade lunch as a way of raising funds. Students did a great job engaging and supporting both activities, which was great to see, and enabled us to raise approximately $350 for the Black Dog Institute - a medical health institute with a specific focus on mental wellbeing.

Our online fundraising is currently at $314 and donations are still open, if you’d like to donate please click on the link below:

https://www.onefootforward.org.au/fundraisers/kaylahrataj

Next week students in Grades 7-9 will select their Realising Potential subjects for next year. All students will select a  double block option (done twice a week, for the whole year) and two single block options (once a week, selecting new subjects mid-year). If you would like to discuss subject choices with your child, the information can be found on Microsoft Teams in the Reece High School Students 2022 Tile, navigating to their current year group's channel. If you would like any further information or have any questions, please contact Mr Franks at school.

Key Word Sign

Key Work Sign (KWS) uses signs and natural gestures to support communication.

For those with communication difficulties KWS can be a useful tool to help when communicating with others. Short, clear sentences are spoken, and the important or key words are signed at the same time.

Some features of KWS include:

• Use of sign and speech at the same time
• Signing the key words but saying the whole sentence
• Using natural gestures, facial expressions, and finger spelling to support what you are trying to say

When we talk, it is often fast, with many words and can have complex concepts. It is difficulty for people with a communication disability to understand what you are saying. Using Key Word Sign helps us to talk slower, in shorter sentences and use simple language.

Please know you are doing more that you realize to support communication when using Key Word Sign!

We will include some basic Key Word Signs in our school newsletter for Term 4. We encourage you to learn and use these easy Key Word Signs in our school.

School Nurse News – Energy drinks

Is your teenager complaining of headaches, mood swings, insomnia or nervousness? Are they consuming energy drinks? These are some common side effects of consuming energy drinks.

The World Health Organization recommends no more than 25g of added sugar per day for adults, and none for 0-2 year olds. As we know energy drinks contain excessive amounts of sugar and caffeine.

• Sugar, as you all know causes cavities.
• But did you also know that it has also been shown to affect the memory, making schoolwork more difficult?
• It creates insulin resistance which in turn can lead to type two diabetes and is strongly linked with weight gain even in people who exercise regularly.

Drinking water would be ideal but swapping your energy drink for almost any other drink would be beneficial. Or maybe try a piece of fruit?

If you would like to discuss this or any other health concern please contact me at the school,

Lisa Evans, School Nurse