Heatherton Christian College Yr 7&8 Camp Blog

From the 8th of May to the 12th, The Summit was lucky enough to work with the year 7’s and 8’s from Heatherton Christian College and we had the greatest time!

On Monday you had a moment to settle in before you were introduced to your coaches that would help you reach awesome Super Stretches throughout the rest of the week. These coaches were: Spinks, Zoe, Yves, Sarah, and Sam and you also got to meet Adam halfway through your week! We were so keen to work with you all! After you met us, you were introduced to our Five Keys that helped you push yourselves and have an epic journey during your time at camp.

These keys are:

1. Have Fun

2. Play All In

3. Make Lots of Mistakes

4. Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable

5. Don’t Go Home Wondering What If

We hope you can use these in your day-to-day life out in the real world! And it was time to jump into our first activities! We started with initiatives that threw you into the deep end in terms of teamwork and setting goals on what we wanted to work on in our individual groups. After those activities, we had our group names! From here on out you were known as:

1. Mini Monkeys

2. Massive Bananas

3. I Don’t Know… Frogs?

4. Team 15

5. Radioactive Royalty

After we finished our initiatives it was off to our first activities! After that, we started to create our team flags and they were stunning! With day one finished it was over to your school for the rest of your evening.

Day two was intense! After hearing from Sarah about setting daily intentions and what ‘intentions’ actually are, we started with a big game of Huckle Buckle. On Monday, Spinks shared with us an epic way to break things down into three steps, and how to set really cool goals. The way we did this was with something called ‘Target, Stretch and Super Stretch’. Spinks told us that a target was something we knew we could definitely do, a stretch was something we could do if we pushed ourselves and a super stretch was something we thought was impossible, the thing we were avoiding. With this in our toolbox of strategies, we headed off to the activities we’d be focusing on for the next day. On Monday you would’ve tried one of the activities we were completing which were:

· Abseil

· Orienteering

· Giant Swing

· Highwire

· Tash’s Ladder

Abseil was about beginning to conquer your un-comfortability surrounding heights and choosing what was going to challenge you the most – really putting the strategies we gave you to the test. Orienteering was about organizing yourselves in smaller groups to use your communication and maps skills to find points hidden around the park, then you got to work together to work out some riddles! Giant Swing helped you let go of things holding you back, you had to be the person to release yourself from an uncomfortable spot, and after a little bit of time there you realized it actually wasn’t that bad. Highwire was based on a lot of trust, trusting yourself, your partner and above all trusting your peers to keep you safe while you were off the ground. Tash’s Ladder was centered around taking that climb, what was at the top of your ladder? What are you climbing towards? After we finished our activities for day two we played a huge game of jockeys that ended with a stand-off between The Summit staff and students, with students just taking out the win of a century! Then we finished our day with one last big game of Gotcha where the students one-upped us again!

Day three was just as insane, it brought with it five brand-new activities! We began by talking with Spinks about the power of our words and how we can show up for ourselves, then up we went into the park to play pirates with Yves! The next activities we got to try were:

· Snowy River Challenge

· Flying Fox

· Scavenger Hunt

· Summit Window

· Cave

Snowy River Challenge was super focused on banding together as a team and problem-solving as we battled the clock to beat the other teams! A lot of our discussions from Snowy finished with us highlighting some epic things we noticed during our rotation – don’t forget to keep pointing out more epic things people are doing back at school. Flying Fox was a great way to have some fun in amongst all the hustle and bustle throughout the day, it’s really cool to look back on how Fox made you feel and what was making you feel that way, for example: was it fun because you were making it fun? Scavenger Hunt involved us in some healthy competition similar to Orienteering, where we needed to work as a team to complete activities to get a bunch of points, if you’d like to see your points again don’t forget to check the table at the end. Summit Window was another epic way to use the Target, Stretch, and Super Stretch methods to help you work your way up our tower – a huge applause to everyone for giving it a go. Remember that the purpose of our activities is not to get all the way to the top, it’s to push yourself to wherever was just outside of your comfort zones, for some of you it was halfway up a tower, for others it was to do the whole activity and both of those are epic achievements! Cave was an awesome way to challenge you without having to get off the ground, a lot of people stop at the first challenge of navigating through the dark but the real challenge came when you had finished and were sitting waiting for your teammates, being as quiet as possible to give everyone the same experience. Then we finished with an awesome round of tic tac toe on chairs where everyone got to the verse at least one team until we had our grand finale against your teachers! Well done for playing all in, we hope you had fun!

On Thursday, you were completing even more activities you hadn’t tried yet! You got to try three of the following:

· Leap of Faith

· Laser Skirmish

· Rock wall

· Trust Games

· Inflatable City

Leap of Faith was absolutely epic to watch! It was so cool seeing everybody pushing themselves, we had some really interesting debriefs about how what we were focusing on usually happened. If you were focusing on the bar 110%, you caught the bar, if you were focused on getting down potentially you didn’t jump for the bar or if you wanted to get the bar but you were worried about a million and one other things you may have gotten close but probably didn’t get the bar. However, just like we said at Highwire don’t forget what the point of the activities are – you all crushed it. Laser Skirmish was an awesome way to finish off with some fun after an intense few days, as was our Inflatable City. Rock Wall was really cool to do as a team because it was similar to Highwire in the sense that your team was looking after your safety but you got to choose the path you took and how high you went. It’s awesome to watch how many different ways people can use to get to the top. Lastly, Trust Games was exactly what it sounds like, and by the fourth day of camp, our trust was already out of the park so it was so cool to hear how well you were all working together to complete the various stages of the activity! After you got to try those activities it was time for an epic, long-awaited Monster Course! We got absolutely filthy, we had so much fun and we pushed ourselves as hard as we could! We got an awesome time for our first lap, but then Adam had broken it to you that throughout all of camp, we were pushing you to be incredible humans and doing things you never thought you could’ve done before, so off we went again! We did a second lap and it was so epic, we pushed our boundaries yet again, is probably the biggest way we ever could! We worked incredibly as a team, we worked out how we could be a little faster in places but above all we looked out for and supported each other the best we could and the results were awesome! If you’d like to see how your team is shaped up, don’t forget to check the table. Then to cap off the day we threw you down the waterslide and then it was off to dinner!

On Friday it dawned on us that we would have to say goodbye, so after listening to Sarah and Spinks speak to you about intentions and how you can show up for you and your team, Sam jumped in front of you all and spoke to you about gratitude! Sam had an epic session planned for us and we finished by watching Beyonce sing ‘I was here’ which hopefully pumped you up for your last day of camp! You got to finish off the last two activities you hadn’t tried yet and then unfortunately it came time to say goodbye. Your values winners got the incredible opportunity of riding in our World War 2 army tank after being nominated by their groups for sticking to our Five Keys the most over camp – you should be immensely proud of yourselves Heidi, Charles, Teresa, Seth, and Campbell! Then it was time for our last goodbyes and you were on the bus.

We are so beyond grateful for how hard you tried, how much growth you experienced, and how much fun we all had during your week-long camp. Continue being incredible humans, don’t forget the lessons you learned, and keep pushing your comfort zone, you’re all going to do some incredible stuff when you get back to school!

Your family in blue,

Sarah, Spinks, Sam, Yves, Zoe and Adam.