Altona College Year 7 Camp Blog

On the stunning morning of Wednesday 28th February 2024, The Summit welcomed the year seven students and teachers of Altona Collage

Students were promptly shown to their accommodation, where they would be staying for the next couple of days! After they got settled, they were welcomed into the Stadium where coach SPINKs gave an introduction to camp and the coaches! Mim informed the students about the Summit’s very own recipe for the best camp ever, and the ingredients to that were the Five Keys of camp. These keys are:

1. Have Fun

2. Play All In

3. Make Mistakes

4. Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable

5. Don’t Go Home Wondering What If

Without further ado, we all headed down to the BBQ shelter and started with a game of 50 Up. Then Mim and Odile taught everyone how to put on a helmet and harness, followed by Adam telling everyone an epic goal-setting strategy called Target, Stretch, and Super Stretch that would help us to grow our comfort zones and conquer challenging activities.

Campers started their first activity with an Initiative Challenge that involved working together to solve a puzzle. This tested teamwork and leadership, but teams rose to the challenge! Then we moved on to our first activity rotation. The activities that campers got to do at the camp were Laser Skirmish, Snowy River Challenge, Giant Swing, Summit Window, Scavenger Hunt, and Leap of Faith. This range of activities challenged people’s bravery, team spirit, support, trust creativity, and problem-solving (to name a few!) 

Day one ended with introducing the students to a camp tradition called GMICs, which stands for “Great Moments in Camp” - this is all about writing down and acknowledging some of the awesome moments we’ve seen.

Day two started with an epic talk about setting a morning intention with Spinks, learning about how important it is to choose to focus on the things we can control, weather and people.  Asking the students to think about who they wanted to be and how they wanted to show up for; themselves, others, and of course the activities. We then played a quick game of Jockeys, before getting into the park and beginning the three activity rotations.

After lunch students had one more activity to complete, to the warmup before the mud run, we played a group game of Pirates, then started dancing to three different songs: Nut-bush, Macarena, and EVERYBODY got the opportunity to get up; dance and get a bit silly. Finally, it was time to do the famous Monster Course, this was a feat of teamwork, strength, and resilience. As students completed the course, the groups were unaware of the fact that they were running two laps of the Monster Course, so they got themselves together and then got the second lap done! The winner of the run was the team that had the biggest improvement time from their first lap. All teams improved by 5 minutes and 30 seconds or more.

As the last day rolled around heaps of GMICs were read out , then Spinks took the kids through a gratitude session, where the students were asked to think about who they are grateful for and what they are grateful for, to not go home wondering ‘what if’ and to ‘check back in’ for the last two rotations of activities to go. Heading down to the BBQ shelter for a quick repeat-after-me exercise called; Big Star, Little Star to warm the students up and as the final rotation came to a close the students were asked to vote for someone in their tribe who represented/embodied the Five Keys the most throughout camp. (These are listed below along with the results)