The outdoor education program lock teaches us lots of cool fundamental survival skills and it gives us knowledge that we can use in the wild through lots of fun activities that also further strengthen our bond as a class.
The activities we conducted for term 1 were rock climbing, ropes, a little bush cooking, and kayaking. These activities provided us with skills to prepare for the term two-day camp. Although we couldn’t have a full night camp because of covid restrictions, we were all excited and couldn’t wait for the day camp.
We returned to Lock after the school holidays, ready for the day camp. The first week was spent doing some more bush cooking and preparing for the day camp, and then the day of the day camp finally arrived.
I got up early in the morning since we had to be at the ISC (indoor sports center) by 6:45 a.m., so I got up at about 5:00 a.m. to prepare for the day, which took me about 10 minutes, and then I was ready to go. I immediately regretted wearing shorts when we arrived at school because it was chilly. I went to my lock group and met up with my buddies after getting my stuff out of the back of my car. The teachers then told us to come around and began discussing how the day would go, after which we boarded our buses and left for the Dwellingup campsite.
After an hour and a half of listening to Joshua’s chin and one of my bus companions chat for an hour and a half, I was ready to get off the bus even sooner, and I was tempted to shatter the window and leap out. When our bus arrived, we all disembarked and learned that our first activity would be cooking. After the teachers had shown us how to set everything up, we were assigned to our cooking groups, which for me were Jing and Jas.
The first thing we did after forming our groups gathered all of the necessary equipment to build a fire, then we brought all of the food supplies and prepared to cook some food. The first thing we did was gather some little pieces of wood and form a tent out of them, then we put the wood on the fire. Our fire wasn’t going so well at first, and as we looked about, we noticed that every other cooking group was already cooking, so we took some initiative and asked the teacher for assistance, and we were finally ready to begin cooking.
we were planning to cook a chicken schnitzel sandwich with egg, lettuce, cheese, and spicy mayo, so we started by toasting the bread in the campfire pan. We had to cover the pan with aluminum foil because it was dirty, but the bread toasted really well, and then we moved on to the schnitzel. The schnitzel took a little longer to make than the toast, but the result was fantastic. Finally, everything was worth our effort because our final brunch product was fantastic; in fact, I thought it was the nicest sandwich I’d ever prepared. After we finished, we cleaned up and got ready for our next activity treetops adventure.
To get to the treetops adventure we had to walk about 5 minutes, and once there, we were told to put on our treetops gear and given a quick tutorial on how to do the course, and then we were off. I started with the black course, which was the second hardest course, but it wasn’t too difficult for me because I had done it before. After that, I continued to the second black course, which was the most difficult course in the treetops. This course was a little more difficult, but it was still manageable.
The most memorable part of my treetops experience was when I was climbing the second black course for the second time and one of our group members became stuck on the course because the safety feature wouldn’t work properly. We had to be patient and use very good effective communication to work together so we could fix the problem, and in the end, we were able to fix the problem and complete the course. Even though it took us 30 minutes to complete a 15-minute course, and everyone was waiting for us to finish, it was an enjoyable experience that paid off in the end.
We hurriedly returned to our bus after that inconvenient setback in order to proceed to our final activity, kayaking. The travel to the kayaking spot was supposed to take roughly 10 minutes, however, due to road construction, it took 25 minutes instead of 10.
We only had about 20 minutes to kayak once we arrived, so we had to utilise a lot of effective communication to make sure we were able to swiftly set up all of the kayaking gear so we could optimise our kayaking time. Even though it was thrilling to be pushed down the stairs to get into the water, it was nevertheless unfortunate that our day ended with a brief kayaking session, despite the fact that we set up so swiftly.
Overall, it was a fantastic day, and I’m grateful to the teachers for putting together such a great day for us. I hope we can do things like this again in the future.