Officer Primary School Year 3 to 6 Camp Blog
On the stunning Monday afternoon of 17th June 2024, The Summit welcomed the year three to six students of Officer Primary School. The students were promptly shown their accommodation, where they would stay 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. All five coaches; Adam, Sara, Jakob, Hayley and Odile then informed the students about The Summit’s recipe for the best camp ever, and the ingredients to that were the Five Keys of camp. These keys are:
Have Fun
Play All In
Make Lots of Mistakes
Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable
Don't Go Home Wondering What If...
Without further ado, we all headed down to the stage and started with a game of 50 up run by Odile. Then Sara and Jakob taught everyone how to put on a helmet and harness, followed by Spinks, 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 campers' activities were Bush Challenge, Flying Fox, Giant Swing and Rockwall, Inflatables, and Laser Skirmish. This range of activities challenged people’s bravery, team spirit, support, trust, creativity and problem-solving (to name a few!)
Day one ended with Tribe Identity, where the teams got to create a flag that would represent their team and chosen values. Before giving the students some free time, we introduced 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 morning intentions with Spinks, learning about how important it is to choose to focus on the things we can control and using the analogy of ‘putting on an intention jacket’. Asking the students to think about who they wanted to be and how the wanted to show up for themselves, others and of course the activities. They played a game of Pirates run by Adam, before getting into the park and beginning the three activity rotations.
After lunch, students did a tribe challenge called Mystical Creatures, where they had to use their team to capture as many creatures as possible for points, thanks to the teachers dressing up and becoming mystical creatures themselves. After having some afternoon team and a bit of line dancing (Macarena and Cotton Eye Joe) the time had finally come 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 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 6 minutes or more.
As the last day rolled around heaps of GMICs were read out, and then Adam led the kids through a gratitude session, where the students were asked to think about who 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 stage, for a game of Jockeys to warm the students up and as the final two rotations 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. As a reward for the Values winners, they got to take a spin in The Summit's very own WW2 army tank, while their peers watched and cheered them on. (These are listed below along with the results)
Thanks again for coming to camp and joining us in having all the fun; all the best for the rest of the year.
Spinks, Adam, Sara, Jakob, Odile and Hayley
