Shelford Girls Grammar Camp Blog

The students and staff from Shelford Girls Grammar arrived on the 30th of November - and boy did they bring some epic people with them! As soon as your coaches met you, we knew we were going to have a wonderful week! You brought some incredible weather with you and we were lucky enough to beat the heat, with some comfortable time in the sun! Just after you dropped off your bags, we as coaches had the amazing opportunity to meet you all, you got to learn a little bit about Yves, Spinks, and Sarah before we then introduced you to five epic things - our Five Keys! After you learned about how to set some awesome goals, we challenged you to use the Five Keys while you were in the park. They were: Have Fun, Play All In, Make Lots of Mistakes, Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable, and Don’t Go Home Wondering What If. You all rose to the occasion and it was so cool to watch!

After all our introductions, we hit the park and jumped into our activities, it was amazing to watch you all already pushing your boundaries! The first thing we did were initiatives, where we put our teamwork skills to the test as we jumped into the deep end to problem solve and communicate together. You would've tried Spider’s Web, Keypunch, or S-puzzle! We all learned so much from the initiatives and we were ready to start the bigger activities, the first three you would’ve tried were: Giant Swing, Snowy River Challenge, and Rock Wall. We got to push our limits on the Giant Swing as we got pretty high in the air and had the task of pulling the cord to begin swing, and boy did you all crush it! Rock Wall was all about backing yourself and trusting your team, you all had some awesome moments on the wall where you continued persevering! Snowy River Challenge was a true test of teamwork, where you were all timed through an obstacle course. The group times were as follows: the Rats came in third with an impressive time of 35 minutes and 14 seconds, the Mudbeasts came in second with an epic 25 minutes and 50 seconds and that means that team Epic took out first place, smashing the course in 25 minutes and 46 seconds… a 4-second difference! After you got to try one of those activities, we finished off Wednesday with Tribe Identity where you all were able to make a wristband for yourself and an epic team chant. The challenge that came with tribe identity was that if anyone was not wearing their wristbands they’d lose team points, and team Epic came out on top for the most consistent wristband wearing.

On Thursday, you were completing whatever you hadn’t done on Wednesday and you got to try one of the new activities as well it would’ve been either: Sky Bridge, Summit Window, or Laser Tag. At the top of our massive tower, we had Window where you got to use Target, Stretch, and Super Stretch to keep expanding your comfort zone the higher you got. Sarah got to see some pretty cool moments on the top of the pole, particularly how well you all pushed yourself to give it a go - namely Stubs, I was so proud of how hard you tried and how incredible it paid off for you - well done! Spinks lead you through the Sky Bridge where you were challenged to make it across to the other side of the lake. Spinks was amazed by how determined you all were to make it across, you all absolutely crushed it! Lastly, you may have tried Laser Tag with Yves on Thursday, Laser Tag was an awesome way to break up the sometimes stressful moments of pushing yourself, it was also super cool to have an activity that you could all do together at the same time, still needing some teamwork to destroy the other half of your activity group - we hope you had heaps of fun! After you got to try one of those activities it was time for an epic game of Tic Tac Toe and tug of war with an epic finale over a pit of water where the two top teams were put against each other in an end-all monkey bar hang-off with Abi, Alex and Evie bringing it home for team Epic!

Then it was into our 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 lap but then as coaches, we got the awesome job of breaking it to you that throughout all of camp we were pushing you to be incredible humans, so off we went again! We did a second lap and it was so epic, we pushed our boundaries yet again, and we all absolutely flew through the course! we worked incredibly as a team, we improved on our time, and we worked out how could be a little faster in places but above all, we looked out for and supported each other the best we could! Each team improved heaps, Rats improved by 7 minutes flat, team Epic improved by 11 minutes and 21 seconds but the Mudbeasts took the win, improving by a whopping 15 minutes and 17 seconds, incredible job!!

On Friday we got to experience the last two activities we hadn’t tried yet and you got to meet Cam who helped you through Laser Tag and Sky Bridge. It was amazing to watch you all continue using the 5 Keys and the Target, Stretch, Super Stretch all the way to the bus - you should all be super proud of yourselves, you crushed camp and left everything out in the park! During your last rotation, you got to vote for one of your teammates from your activity group, you would have voted for them because you recognized how well they were using the 5 Keys and they stood out to you over the course of your camp, the people your cohort ended up voting for were: Zoe for team Epic, Jacquie for the Rats and Maddy for her team - Mudbeasts! You should all be very proud of yourselves, you’ve been recognized by your teammates for truly embodying what camp it’s all about, well done!

What an epic way to spend three days! Thank you so much for joining us on such an epic journey, you’re all such awesome people! Keep pushing yourselves!

All the love,

Sarah, Spinks, Yves, and Cam