Upper Plenty PS Camp Blog

When the buses from Upper Plenty Primary School rolled through the gates of The Summit on an unusually wet Wednesday morning, we were preparing for what was going to be an amazing week. The energy and enthusiasm of all the students were 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 couple of rounds of activities.

High Wire and the Flying Fox were the instant highlights, the Bush Challenge was epic and Inflatable City was just fun. There were definitely many personal boundaries pushed and fears overcome, with too many kids to mention pushing beyond what they first thought they were capable of.

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

Grp 1 - The Kebabs

Grp 2 - MEF’s

Grp 3 - Sonic Squad

Grp 4 - Bread! (Nom Nom Nom)

After a Trivia and dance party on Wednesday night, Thursday was kicked off with a morning intentions chat from Kid President before getting straight into the next round of activities. The day turned out to be a bit wet and cool, but everyone was so into the activities we couldn’t tell.

Before lunch we had the opportunity to start another round of activities, this time introducing the students to our epic Giant Swing, dark and creepy Cave experience, exciting Laser Skirmish, and the dizzying but awesome Tash’s Ladder! It was so awesome to see almost every student give it a go!

Thursday afternoon we also embarked on our epic Monster Course, a mud run around the grounds of The Summit involving tyres, charades, mud, cargo nets, holey buckets, mud, a ball pit and more mud! 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 Bread, who really embraced everything we threw at them!

Friday started with another chat about gratitude from Kid President, 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 on the stage to say our thank you’s to all the people involved in making this camp epic before reading out the winners of the various activities.

Thank you so much to the parents, teachers, and students of Upper Plenty 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 soon.

Adam, Spinks, Sarah, Ordile, Aron, Jacob, and Liam