Richmond High School Year 7 Camp Blog

When the buses rolled through the gates of The Summit on an unusually overcast Monday morning, we were preparing for what was going to be an amazing week. The energy and enthusiasm of all the students were addictive and we loved it. 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 heading down into the park to play a couple of games. We then showed everyone our harnesses and how to set themselves Targets, Stretches, and Super Stretches before getting into our first couple of rounds of activities.

Tash’s Ladder and the Flying Fox were the instant highlights, the High Wire was challenging, the Bush Challenge and the Snake and Nails experience were epic and Orienteering 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.

Before the camp had even started each group had come up with a name for themselves that was agreed upon by all with colours and even head or wrist bands to match, and these are the names they came up with;

Grp 1 - The Blue Aces

Grp 2 - Yellow Mellow

Grp 3 - The Oranges

Grp 4 - The Purple Spaghettis

Grp 5 - The Green Peppers

Grp 6 - The Chili Peppers

After an evening Trivia night, Tuesday was kicked off with a morning intentions chat from Spinks before getting straight into the next round of activities. The afternoon turned out to be a bit cool, but everyone was so into the activities we couldn’t tell. We also had the opportunity to swap the Bush Challenge for the Leap of Faith, mainly due to weather requirements, but it was great to be able to give everyone a chance to challenge themselves on the leap!

Tuesday afternoon we also embarked on our epic Monster Course, a mud run around the grounds of The Summit involving tires, charades, mud, cargo nets, holey buckets, mud, a ball pit, and more mud! 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 Yellow Mellow and Chili Peppers (with a bit of assistance in the form of some prior knowledge!)!

Friday started with another chat from Timmy about gratitude before a new bunch of activities we introduced, our epic Sky Bridge, scary High Abseil, the awesome Inflatable City, the Scavenger Hunt, and our Trust Games.

After we wound up the last of our group challenges, 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 say our thank you's 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 of year 7 at Richmond High School for an awesome few days. 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, Tim, Spinks, Mim, Yves, Zoe, Shanara, Steph, and Liam