2017 Camp Week – Year 7 (Camp Toukley)

The focus of the Year 7 Camp is relationships, and our time away from the Campus provides the students with guided opportunities to form a support network of close friends that they will potentially keep for their entire school experience and beyond. We as a staff, in conjunction with the staff at Camp Toukley, created a program that we felt targeted our main wellbeing outcomes: resilience, self confidence and peer support.I asked a couple of the students to write a brief comment about some of aspects of the camp experience which stood out to them.

Of the camp activities Georgie W (7H) wrote:

“Year 7’s time at Camp Toukley was amazing! We all came away with some fabulous memories and experiences. There were lots of really fun activities which taught us to work together as a team and there were other activities like the Leap of Faith which brought out the confidence in people. I know that many of the Year 7’s really enjoyed the facilities of Camp Toukley like the tennis court and obstacle course. We all had a great time and we thank the staff at Camp Toukley for their amazing hospitality.”

Each evening we scheduled a series of activities and small group debriefs so we could take stock of our day and see what we took out of it. On this Aila B (7H) said:

“Year 7 Camp was really fun! Each night, after dinner, we had some activities run by our teachers which were interesting and fun. There was a trivia night, a Capture-the-Flag night, and a campfire-movie night. For the trivia, we split ourselves into 10 groups. My group was the only group of six, but we tied for 3rd place anyway. For Capture-the-Flag, the teams were our class groups. Since there were 3 classes, we took turns competing with each other. Our class, 7H, won all the games we played. The campfire-movie night was great! We had marshmallows we could roast and they were very delicious! We also watched part of Inside Out later in the night. After supper each night, we split into our activity groups to talk about the day, what we liked or disliked, how we pushed ourselves further, and many other things as well. We discussed negative and positive self-talk, and that we should encourage others.”

All in all it was a thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding experience, and a privilege for staff to spend time with this exceptional group of young people.

Click Here to see a selection of images from our Camp experience here on our Facebook Gallery.

Mr Daniel Zyderveld
Year 7 Coordinator