Northside Christian College Year 8 Camp Blog
On Monday 13th March 2024, The Summit welcomed the year eight students and teachers of Northside Christian Collage.
The students were promptly shown to their accommodation, where they would be staying 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. The students were then informed about The Summit’s very own recipe for the best camp ever, and the ingredients to that are the Five Keys of camp. These keys are:
Have Fun
Play All In
Make Mistakes
Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable
Don’t Go Home Wondering What If
Without further ado, we all headed down to the BBQ shelter and started with a game of 50 Up. Then Jakob and Spinks taught everyone how to put on a helmet and harness, followed by Sunny discussing 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 activities that campers got to do at camp were Tash’s Ladder, Snake and Trust, Giant Swing, Laser Skirmish, Cave, Rock Wall and Bush Challenge. This range of activities challenged people’s bravery, team spirit, support, trust creativity and problem-solving skills (to name a few!)
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, mainly weather and people. 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. We then played a quick game of Pirates, before getting into the park and beginning the three activity rotations.
After lunch students had one more activity to complete, Finally, it was time to do the famous Monster Course, which was a feat of teamwork, strength and resilience. As the 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 4 minutes and 14 seconds or more.
As the last day rolled around heaps of GMICs were read out, and then Spinks took the kids through a gratitude session, where the students were asked to think about who they are grateful for 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 BBQ shelter for a game of Jockeys and a game called Crane, Tiger, Egg to warm the students up as the final rotation 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. (These are listed below along with the results)
Thanks again for coming and having all the fun, all the best with the rest of the year.
Spinks, Sam, Sunny, Jakob, and Anthony
