Dear Parents, Students and Friends of Prospect High School,

I can’t believe it is the final week of Term 3 and this is the final newsletter. It has been a busy term filled with many accomplishments and successes across the grades.

Rock Challenge

In the last newsletter, I announced that Prospect High School had two finalists in the acoustic section of the Tasmanian Rock Challenge Final: Summer and Julia. I am thrilled to announce Summer won the state final Tasmanian Rock Challenge High School Acoustic section. The competition was held at the Launceston Conference Centre, and the girls performed their solo originals live competing against other entrants from across the state. Congratulations to both girls on their strong performances and for representing Prospect High School with pride. Many thanks to Mr Tony Gutierrez for offering this opportunity.

Bucket Hats and Caps

Many thanks to families who have purchased the new Prospect High School bucket hats and caps. They have been very popular. There will be a period of “phasing in” next term with these items becoming part of the uniform in 2022. Bucket hats and caps can be purchased from the uniform shop.

Student and Staff Success

Three Prospect High School students, Lewis, Oscar and Grace, along with Mr Colson, have been selected as part of the Tasmanian Thunder Touch football teams, who will be participating in the National Youth Championships on the Sunshine Coast, Qld, during the school holidays. Mr Colson – Head Coach Girls 14s, Oscar - Boys 12s, Lewis – Boys 14s, Grace – Shadow for Girls 14s. Best wishes for the tournament.

Krispy Kreme Fundraiser

A massive thank you to Riley for his hard work and persistence with organising the Krispy Kreme SLB fund raiser. We were presented with a few challenges of arrival time for the Krispy Kremes, however, it was definitely worth it. Congratulations to Riley and thanks in particular to Riley’s family, Mrs Slore, and Ms Webb.

 9/10 Performance

On Tuesday evening the Grade 9/10 Drama class performed Girl Who Cried Wolf. The Dance/Drama room was filled to capacity with family, friends, students, and staff who watched this excellent production. The performance was a great mix of humour and fun with important messages. Our students displayed amazing talent.

Congratulations and thank you to Mrs Genevieve Viney for providing this opportunity for students. Congratulations also to the Music and Catering students who provided such high-quality pre-show refreshments and entertainment.

In finishing, I would like to thank families for their support and encouragement in helping Prospect High School continue to be an excellent learning community. We are proud to be able to offer so many wonderful opportunities and experiences for students. I wish all families an enjoyable holiday and look forward to working with you next term.

Mrs Lee Barker
Principal

This has been a busy, but very interesting term in Senior Secondary @ Prospect. We've had a number of guest speakers come and share their expertise in Herbal Medicine, Naturopathy, Aromatherapy, and Remedial Massage. We were so pleased that we were able to extend these workshop opportunities to Year 9 and 10 students who had such a great time and benefited from learning about self-care and therapies to boost their physical, emotional, and mental wellbeing. 

We also ran an extremely popular and successful Open Day which was well subscribed to by students from Exeter, Lilydale, Queechy, Riverside, Kings Meadows, and Prospect high schools. These taster days gave students an insight into the specialised programmes offered at Senior Secondary @ Prospect, a chance to look around our school and to meet the 11/12 teachers. 

Term 3 is often one of the busiest and can be a stressful time for many Year 11 and 12 students. It is during this term that following on from their August reports that many students put in extra work to improve their grades and work hard to get assignments completed for marking or resubmission. It's also the term that provides the foundations for the exam period. Once Year 11 and 12 students return to school for Term 4, they only have four weeks of study before the exams for level 3 and 4 subjects, and then their school year is over. All Year 11 and 12 students are encouraged to relax and recharge over the school holidays. It's also a good time to maybe spend a little time on sorting, culling and reorganising work folders, as a well-organised system of notes and filing means less time wasted on finding information and more time for study and revision. 

To this end, in Term 4, the Year 11 and 12 teachers at Senior Secondary @ Prospect will be running a series of workshops to help prepare Year 10 students for their transition in Year 11. These workshops will include: Is this the right course for me?; note-taking; referencing; time management; study skills, and preparing for exams. We will also be holding an Information Afternoon on Tuesday, 26th October from 3.30 - 6pm. Parents, guardians, and students are warmly invited to drop in and have a chat with the Year 11 and 12 teachers, learn more about the courses we're looking to run in 2022 as well as our speclialised programmes. Refreshments made by our catering students will be served. 

We hope that all students across the school have a wonderful holiday, and we look forward to continuing our transition and course selection conversations in Term 4. 

Jennifer Pollard, Jan Phillips, Adrienne McMahon and Anh Quach

In our last lesson of Grade 7/8 Fashion and Craft the students were lucky to participate in a "Paint the Town Red" session with owner/artist Leigh Dobson.

Students were able to follow Leigh’s direction and create a fantasy painting of their own showcasing individual artistic talent.

This group of students have been actively demonstrating empathy and care for others through charity work for Strike it Out- help for Homeless and Headspace. Keep an eye and ear out for our market stall in October for Headspace.

The results were outstanding and the students were grateful for such a wonderful opportunity.

Thanks again to Leigh for coming in and running the entertaining session!

After a term of intensive rehearsals, on Tuesday evening the Grade 9/10 Drama class successfully presented their play Girl Who Cried Wolf, by Australian playwright Angela Betzein, to an audience of family and school community members.

Girl Who Cried Wolf is a gothic comedy morality tale that uses heightened realism, dark humour and technical theatre elements to explore many themes and issues. These include conformity, truth, isolation, friendship, fantasy, celebrity, grief, and the role that the media plays in perpetuating these issues. While these are some pretty serious themes, it is a very funny play. During our first class read through, there were many laugh-out-loud moments.

From the ‘catty’ Catriona with lines such as, ‘Did you mother microwave you at birth!’ and her tag-along boyfriend who cannot think of a better insult than: ‘you freaking…freak face’, to lying Laura Black, who is always trying to look more intelligent and competent than she really is, ‘I’ll have to report you for advertising the course of justice’, to the snappy tuckshop ‘lady’ who would rather ignore the grief of others for the sake of being ‘pleasant’. There are some truly awful (yet awfully entertaining) moments of dark humour.

Watching the class come to understand the characters and what they represented, and then experiment with ways to convey them to an audience, was fantastic. A lot of work went into really thinking about the characters – their motivations and influences as individuals, and also their importance to the play as a whole. And as we dove deeper into the play, more about the characters came to reveal themselves, such as Joe Black, who we came to see as someone still suffering from the mental effects of war and the treatment that he faced in the so-called ‘Pleasant Lakes’. Or Ada, the sister of the missing boy, who finally emerges to see the sun after five years of being frozen in time after the loss of her twin brother. Not all characters were so ‘deep’, however, some were just plain fun – like that brittle tuck-shop lady, the Idol MC, the disenchanted teacher, the foreboding narrators, the ‘good cop/bad cop’ detectives, the property magnate, and the P.E teacher, Mr Neat (please, someone take away that whistle!!)

In addition to the effective and engaging acting choices used by the performers, I was equally impressed by the work of our amazing tech crew who handled over 80 lighting cues, 50 projector slides and 32 sound cues with aplomb!! Not an easy feat!

Outside the performance space, a congratulation also needs to go to Ms Adrienne McMahon’s catering class who made such fabulous refreshments (including mocktails!), and to Mr Tony Guiterrez’s music students, Jamisen, Tiana and Julia, who provided fabulous performances in our pre-show ‘soiree’.

Many staff contributed to the success of the play, and what we achieved would not have been possible without them. Please have a look at the programme which is attached to this article for a complete thank you list. The programme also features the names of all of the students who were involved in the performance – both actors and tech crew.

As their Drama teacher, I could not be prouder of the work that the class put into this play, or of the quality of the show that they produced. AND I was most pleased that the class allowed me to use the song ‘Little Boxes’ as the music for bows! (Even if I did have to find a version more contemporary than the Malvina Reynolds 1962 original!)

A big well done to those involved! It was a lot of fun!

Mrs Genevieve Viney, Drama Teacher

On Tuesday evening the Grade 9/10 Catering classes provided refreshments for guests attending the 9/10 Drama Production “The Girl Who Cried Wolf”. Our wonderful students served parents, teachers and friends a range of freshly prepared goodies and made mocktails to accompany them.

It was a great event to be a part of and gave the students an authentic, out-of-hours hospitality opportunity.

The volunteers were Hayley O Callaghan, Tori Adams, Ellina Stearnes, Lily Branch, and Sophie Batterham. A huge thank you to these students for helping out so brilliantly!

Mrs McMahon, Hospitality and Catering Teacher

On Tuesday and Wednesday this week Gr.7 students had the opportunity take part in a visit by Chloe Simons from the Marine Discovery Centre. Students were presented with information on a variety of marine species their habitats and interesting attributes. The students worked on food webs, shell sizing for classification, and were able to touch some of the amazing animals that Chloe bought with her from Woodbridge, Hobart. I think the favourite to touch was the shark or maybe the sea cucumber. Thank you Chloe and Woodbridge Marine Discovery Centre for the wonderful presentation.

This week, the Science Department travelled to Summerdale to be part of their Science Expo. Mrs. Matthews, Mr. Black, Cali, Josie, and Julia conducted dry ice experiments with all the students and helped them use some of our wonderful microscopes. The smiles on the faces of the students were fantastic. It was such a fun experience for all.

Nature Nuts have been enjoying the sun and planting heaps of vegetables for the kitchens in the garden. We have been experimenting with worm juice from our worm farm as a fertilizer and intend to use a few worms in local rivers in the holidays.

Three Prospect High School students, Lewis, Oscar and Grace, along with Mr Colson, have been selected as part of the Tasmanian Thunder Touch football teams and will be participating in the National Youth Championships on the Sunshine Coast, Qld, during the school holidays. Mr Colson – Head Coach Girls 14s, Oscar - Boys 12s, Lewis – Boys 14s, Grace – Shadow for Girls 14s. All of these players, along with 110 of their team mates, have trained hard throughout the winter, and while Grace won’t be participating in the tournament, she has taken the opportunity to continue to develop her skills training with the rest of her team. We would like to wish them the very best for the tournament.

On Friday, 17th September, a group of 9/10 boys competed in the Northern High Schools Netball Championships held at Silverdome. They played against Brooks, Penguin and Leyland High School. Despite a series of tough games, they played with with their heads held high, and their effort and attitude was outstanding. We look forward to next year's comp! 

We have been fortunate to have Mark Brown from the PCYC lead a group of students in Taiko drumming this term. The students showcased their skills to all of the grade 7 and 8 students in a performance piece.  It was simply stunning!  Congratulations to all of the students who have worked with Mark this term.  You showed the values of Growth, Respect and Courage!

Our new PHS hats are now available to purchase via QKR or from the school office. We still have caps available but unfortunately we have sold out of bucket hats. We expect a new order of these will arrive in approx 4 weeks. 

Grade 10

Zac 10-1  For being optimistic, fair, respectful, always on task, responsible, really well organised and communicating well.

Cali 10-1  For showing empathy, fairness and respect to fellow students and teachers, and optimism and perseverance with her learning

School Executive

Principal
Mrs Lee Barker

Assistant Principals
Mr Mario Bergamin and Ms Bonnie Hall

School Business Manager
Miss Kiara Daly

Grade Teams

Senior Grade Leaders
Grade 7 Mrs Hannah Derbyshire
Grade 8 Mr Brendan Poke
Grade 9 Ms Sandra De Paoli
Grade 10 Mrs Carmen Slore
Years 11/12 Ms Jennifer Pollard

Grade Leaders
Grade 7 Mrs Katrina Dawkins and Mr Scott Brewer
Grade 8 Miss Kirsty Wilson and Mr Brad Colson
Grade 9 Mr Will Reynolds and Mrs Leonie Smith
Grade 10 Mrs Sonya Matthews and Mr Steven Andrews
Years 11/12 Mrs Jan Phillips

Support Staff

School Psychologist
Mr Gene Colgrave
(Mondays and Fridays)

School Social Worker
Mr Brendan Dixon
(Wednesdays, alternate Thursdays and Fridays)

School Health Nurse
Mrs Mia Blair
(Tuesdays and alternate Fridays)

Chaplain
Mr Lachie Unwin
(Tuesdays and Thursdays)

Aboriginal Education Officer
Miss Taylor Wigg
(Mondays and Fridays)