Somerville SC Year 8 Camp Blog
On the stunning morning of Wednesday 25th October 2023, the Summit welcomed the students and teachers from Somerville Secondary College.
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! Tim introduced Adam, Zoe, Mim, Aron, Jakob, and their team leader Spinks! Adam spoke to the students about The Summit’s very own recipe for the best camp ever, and the ingredients that were the Five Keys of camp. These keys are:
Have Fun
Play All In
Make Lots of Mistakes
Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable
Don’t Go Home Wondering What If
Without further ado, we all headed down to the activities hub and started with a game of 50 Up. Then Mim and Aron taught everyone how to put on a helmet and harness, followed by Adam telling everyone about our epic goal-setting strategy that would help us to grow our comfort zones and conquer challenging activities.
The three goals are :
Target
Stretch
Super Stretch
Campers started their first activity with two initiative challenges that involved working together to solve a puzzle. This tested teamwork and leadership, but the teams rose to the challenge! Then we moved on to our first activity rotation. The activities that campers got to do at camp were Rock Wall, High Wire, Flying Fox, Laser Skirmish, and Snowy River Challenge. This range of activities challenged people’s bravery, team spirit, support, trust creativity, and problem-solving (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 setting a morning intention with Spinks, learning about how important it is to choose to focus on the things we can control. Asking the students to think about who they wanted to be and how they wanted to show up for themselves, others, and of course the activities. Before getting into the park and beginning the activity rotations we played a game of Pirates.
After lunch students had one more challenge to complete, to warm up before the mud run, we started with a tug of war competition where the winning tribe was BLTs, then they completed a giant version of TIC TAC TOE where they were the pieces, the winning tribe was Cutie Little ladybugs. Finally, it was time to do the famous Monster Course with the added bonus of the waterslide to rinse off, which made everything more dramatic and fun. The tribes completed the first lap course, stopping the timer, and were banded together and told that they were running another lap, as the winner of the Monster Course was the tribe with the biggest improvement time. This was a massive feat of teamwork, strength, and resilience. All tribes improved by 5 minutes or more.
As the last day rolled around Coach Adam took the kids through a gratitude session, where the students were asked to think about who and or what makes them feel grateful and to ‘check back in’ for the last two rotations of activities to go. The group played Jockeys to warm the students up and 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)
On behalf of all of us here at The Summit we would like to say a huge thank you! We wish you all the best for the rest of the year!
