Peninsula Grammar School

Once again, The Summit was host to the Peninsula Grammar School for their 5-day year 7 camp. The school has been coming to The Summit for many years and we always look forward to their return. 2020 was no exception. The program that we designed for Peninsula Grammar School aimed to push many different aspects of the groups’ skills as well as challenging many different fears.

On Monday the 2nd when the school arrived, they were introduced to our Summit team and introduced our five keys to a successful camp. The group quickly realized that these keys (Have Fun, Play All In, Make Lots of Mistakes, Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable and Don’t Go Home Wondering What If) would be something that they would need to learn and incorporate into their thought processes as quickly as they could so that they could get the most out of what we offer. Once the group was ready, we marched out into the park to play and have fun. We started the activities with a game of Pirates which got the students up and moving quickly and was a lot of fun. And then we moved into two rotations of “initiatives” which were a set of different activities that would test the groups’ teamwork and their ability to solve problems. During these initiatives the groups also had to come up with a name for each of their tribes. The names that they decided on were :

Group 1 - The Peanut-butter Babies Group 2 - Princess Ponies Group 3 - Bin Chickens Group 4 - Crazy Navy’s Group 5 – Redagades Group 6 - P Squared

Group 7 - Vegemite Boomers

Group 8 - Vakama

Group 9 - Fluffy Flaming Dragons

Group 10 - Shrek Wazowski

Group 11 - Tim Tom Bombs

Group 12 - The Goats

After working together to create their tribe names and completing the initiatives, the group was given some free time. Three of the groups, however, were the first to experience our camp out. There were three new groups every night doing the campout, night one were groups 1, 2 and 3. On the camp out the students and teachers cooked themselves a delicious pasta dish using a Trangia and also spent the night sleeping in dome tents that they had to assemble themselves. The camp out experience was designed so that the year 7’s are prepared for their adventure camp in year 8.

The students who did not camp out ate dinner in the lodge and also participated in our Trivia Blitz run by Ash and Liam which was a fun and entertaining way to end day one. On day two of camp, it was time to start pushing their limits on some of our more challenging activities. The students were presented with The Abseil, Flying Fox, Giant Swing, Cave Experience, Bush Challenge Course, High Wire, Inflatable City, Leap of Faith, Snake and Nails, Summit Window Snowy River Challenge and Laser Skirmish. The activities were a mix of high off the ground challenges, closed and dark spaces, team building activities and lots and lots of fun. The groups did four different ones and rotated through them all day. It was obvious to the coaches that these students were ready to get comfortable being uncomfortable, but it was going to take a lot of effort from the students to push past their fears and really get the most out of their camp experience. Tuesday ended with a big group game of Giants, Wizards, and Dwarves before the groups were once again split. The groups that were not on the camp out attended Our Minute to Win it challenge with Cam and Trinette that got the students up and having fun. The leaders were especially impressed by Harry who managed to stack three golf balls on top of each other in a tower, a challenge that not many ever managed to complete. The winner of M2WI was the Princess Ponies with Vakama coming in a close second, followed by Tim Tom Bombs.

Day three of camp started with some group challenges that involved running away from The Summit staff and Peninsula teachers in a game of Poison Ball as well as our new 12-Man Tug of War. Back into the activities, the students began to push themselves even harder as they let our 5-keys really take effect and started to learn from their mistakes whenever possible.

After activities were done we brought the students to our “airfield” for our Epic Tribe Challenges which pitched the tribes up against each other in 6 different stations. Once the challenges were over we sang along to the worlds greatest and then all hell broke loose with a surprise water balloon fight with all the student and teachers getting involved in the festivities.

Our evening activities for the Wednesday were once again hosted by Ash and Liam and included an intense strategy game that the students got the hold on extremely quickly, followed by an adventure through the bushland in the dark to end the night. The weather started to turn around on us before we went out on the walk, however, no weather was going to stop us from embarking on our trek and it was enjoyed by all. Thursday started off back on our activities, but after lunch, we began our Monster Course with the students. The Monster Course was full of challenges that saw our students push themselves to their limits and got them all feeling comfortable feeling uncomfortable just as planned. The winners of the course were determined by the improvement times for each group between laps. They are:

Group 1 - 7:28 Group 2 - 10:21 Group 3 - 3:01 Group 4 - 9:55 Group 5 - 8:03 Group 6 - 4:13 Group 7 - 9:12 Group 8 - 8:16 Group 9 - 10:18 Group 10 - 7:01 Group 11 - 9:26 Group 12 - 7:50

Leaving group 2, the Princess Ponies in 1st place with their impressive improvement time of 10 minutes and twenty-one seconds! All of the groups really came together and showed us some amazing teamwork and determination.

The night ended with a relaxing movie as the last day at camp concluded. On Friday we finished off our last two rotations of activities giving the students one last opportunity to show each other and themselves what they are truly capable of.

At the end of the last rotation, all of the groups nominated one person from their group that really stood out and followed our 5 keys. The votes were done anonymously and as a result, these people got the most votes: Ella B, Ollie, Tom, Lola, Felicia, Zac, Mitch, Hamish, Nina, Bailey, Ben L, and Will. These students got rewarded with a hot lap in our WW2 army tank before the whole group got on their busses and left.

Thank you for coming to camp Peninsula Grammar, see you all again next year!

Bush and Snowy Times