Armadale PS Year 5 and 6 Camp Blog

We were so excited to see the buses from Armadale Primary School roll through the gates of The Summit on a cool and overcast Wednesday morning, we were hopping and jumping around preparing for what was going to be an amazing week. The energy and enthusiasm of all the students was almost out of control 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 playing a couple of games, showing everyone our harnesses and how to set themselves Targets, Stretches and Super Stretches, and getting into our first round of activities.

Giant Swing was an instant highlight, the Snowy River Challenge was epic, The Snake and Nails was not what anyone expected, and our Laser Skirmish was just fun!

Towards the end of the first session, each group was asked to come up with a name for themselves that was agreed upon by all, and these are the names they came up with.

Grp 1 - Fish Brains

Grp 2 - The Smurfs

Grp 3 - Team King George

Grp 4 - Creeping Wombats

After an evening of roasting marshmallows by the fire combined with a Night Walk on Wednesday, Thursday was kicked off with a morning intentions chat from Kid President before getting straight into the next rounds of activities.

That same morning, we also embarked on a new round of activities, including our thrilling Flying Fox, dark and creepy Cave, insanely bouncy Inflatable City and our biggest individual challenge of the camp, The Summit Window. It was amazing up on top of our big tower seeing so many nervous students push themselves way past what they thought capable of on the window, every one of you should be incredibly proud of yourselves and each other.

Thursday afternoon we also embarked on our epic Monster Course, a wet and dirty run around the grounds of The Summit involving tyres, charades, dirt, cargo nets, holey buckets, water, a ball pit, barbed wire, more mud and a whole lot of fun! 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 The Smurfs! The resilience shown by the students to not only complete a second lap but to do it as well as they did was an inspiration.

Friday started with another chat about gratitude from Kid President, who gave us a whole new perspective on what there is to be grateful for before we completed our round of activities.

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 at the stage for the last time to say our thank yous to all the people involved in making this camp epic before reading out the winners of the various activities and rewarding our Values Winners with a ride on our WW2 ARMY TANK!

It was also cool to be able to squeeze a lap in for the teachers who had worked so hard to make your experience what it was.

Thank you so much to Zaim, Brad, Jarryd, Connie, Jenny, the parents, teachers, and students of Armadale Primary School for an awesome week. 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 in a couple of years with another group of incredible 5 / 6’s.

Adam, Sam, Miriam, Jacob, Sara, Odile, and Liam