St Thomas PS Year 6 Camp Blog

On a sunny Monday afternoon, the students of St Thomas Primary School came through The Summit gates. Eager to get going, they were shown to their accommodations, students got together in The Lodge and were introduced to The Summit coaching staff and team leader Spinks. They were told about The Summit's ‘Five Keys’ to a successful camp. Shortly after they were shown to the stage and played a game of 50 Up to move their bodies.  Students were shown how to put a harness and a helmet on, and discussed The Summit's goal-setting strategy called ‘Target, Stretch, and Super Stretch’.

The Five 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

Day one ended with introducing 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 a morning intention with Spinks, learning about how important it is to choose to focus on the things we can control, the things out of our control daily at camp are, weather, people, and the activities at camp.  I asked the students to think about 'Who' they wanted to be and how they wanted to show up for; themselves, their teammates, and of course the activities. Right after we got everyone standing up to play a game called ‘Crane, Tiger, Egg’ where the objective was to strike one of the three poses, and if you matched the one Spinks was doing, you were eliminated.  Tribes then made their way down to the stage and played a game of Jockeys to move their bodies and get ready for the day.

After rotation 3 and lunch, all groups had one more rotation to complete, all groups then had some afternoon tea, and then with the tunes pumping, we danced to the song ‘Cotton Eye Joe’ and the nut-bush. With the teachers and students, ' energy high, the groups took off for the much-awaited Monster Course. After nailing their first lap, the group was unaware they were going to run the same course twice, we do this to show resilience and teach the students that when they think they’ve got nothing left, they can dig deep and still keep going. The winner of the course is determined by the group with the biggest improvement time from the first lap, all tribes crushed their time by at least 6 minutes, a massive effort.  To end the day, we took all groups up to the Barbed Wire crawl where everyone had the opportunity to get EVEN MUDDIER, they then had a group photo before hitting the showers.

On day three, the final day of camp the tribes had two more activities to go.  In the morning, when the tribe made their intentions clear we also did gratitude at the stage, Spinks ran the group through a group visualization where they could use a remote to flick through three categories: Family, Pets/Animals, and Friends, allowing them to take the opportunity to be thankful for the people in their lives. The last key, Don’t Go Home Wondering ‘What If’, students were challenged to not go ‘checking out’ early and to be present during the last two activities. To start off the tribe got their bodies moving to do a repeat-after-me game called ‘Big Star Little Star’. They then completed two rotations of activities to wrap camp up.

On the last debrief, the tribes were told to reflect upon camp, and the growth that has been shown. The students were given a tool called 'Rock, Stick, and Leaf' to take with them back to school. (Something that ROCKed their world about camp, something that will STICK with them as a memory, and something they will Leaf (leave) behind at camp that they no longer need (figuratively). The team also voted for a Values winner amongst their tribe, someone who represented the Five Keys throughout the camp; after the winners were chosen and read out, they got the honor of going for a ride in The Summit's very own WW2 army tank, while the rest of the tribes cheered them on.  

 The activities that ran were Giant Swing, Rock Wall, High Wire, Scavenger Hunt, Inflatable City, Cave, Snowy Rover Challenge, and Laser Skirmish

SHOUTOUTS:

Patrick C. = being the only person in his year to make it to the top of the overhanging wall at the Rock Wall Challenge

Frankie = for being the fastest person up the wall on the other side (yellow and red blocks), with a time of 29.51 seconds, well done!

Jett = is close behind with a time of 33.83 seconds, great job team!

On behalf of The Summit and the coaching staff, we would like to thank you once again for joining us on camp and wish you all the best with the rest of the term and an exciting new year ahead.

Spinks, Odile, Jakob, Calarnee, and Sam.