Brookside College - Caroline Springs Year 4 Camp Blog

When the buses from Brookside Primary School rolled through the gates of The Summit on a cloudy but warm Monday morning, we were preparing for what was going to be an amazing week. The other coaches and I gathered in the Lodge with them to introduce ourselves and our Five Keys of Have Fun, Play All In, Make Mistakes, Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable, and Don’t Go Home Wondering What If, before playing a couple of games, showing everyone our harnesses and how to set themselves Targets, Stretches, and Super Stretches, and getting into our first round of activities.

Tash’s Ladder and the Flying Fox were the instant highlights, Rock Wall was challenging, the Bush Challenge was epic and Inflatable City was just fun. There were definitely many personal boundaries pushed and fears overcome, with too many kids to mention pushing beyond what they first thought they were capable of.

Towards the end of the first activity, each group was asked to come up with a name for themselves that was agreed upon by all, and they were then known as:

Grp 1 - Smurf Cats

Grp 2 - 2Pac

Grp 3 - Minions

Grp 4 - Cheese Balls

Grp 5 - Super Knights

We then gathered in the Lodge to form our own Tribe Identities. We developed a team chant and made a flag, complete with the team's name, logo, chosen value, and all the names of the team members.

After the night walk on Monday, Tuesday was kicked off with a morning Intentions chat from Kid President before getting straight into the next round of activities. The afternoon turned out to be a bit cloudy, but everyone was so into the activities we couldn’t tell.

Tuesday afternoon, after an awesome game of Magical Creatures, we also embarked on our epic Monster Course, a run around the grounds of The Summit involving tires, charades, cargo nets, holey buckets, water, a ball pit, and a whole lot of fun! The course was scored using each team's improvement time from the first lap to the surprise second lap, with everyone doing amazingly, but being dominated by The Cheesse Balls and Smurf Cats!

Wednesday started with another chat about gratitude from Kid President before wrapping up our final round of activities

We then asked each of the kids to vote on a Values winner, or the person in their group they felt used our Five Keys the best to make camp a rewarding experience for not only themselves but their whole team. The winners are listed below with all the times for each of the recordable activities. We gathered on the stage to do our flag and chant presentation, play a big game of Pirates, have lunch, and say our thank yous to all the people involved in making this camp epic before reading out the winners of the various activities.

Thank you so much to the parents, teachers, and students from Brookside Primary School for an awesome week. You were all so incredibly dedicated to ensuring your camp was an amazing experience. We at The Summit can’t wait to have you back again soon.

Adam, Miriam, Sophie, Calarnee, Odile, Aron, and Liam