(Photo taken by Fraser)
Welcome back to my blog. This post is my recap of our second ever field study, which happened to be to the same place as our first. Loon Lake. Going into this trip, I was kind of disappointed about it. One of the main selling points of PLP for me was the field studies, and because of COVID, we haven’t really gotten to go anywhere that far away from home. Even thought I a little disappointed about our destination, I was still looking forward to the week away from home. One of the reasons that I was excited for this trip is because the group that was going was much smaller, and we weren’t going with the grade below us. Most of my friends that were in PLP were going on this trip, so I was looking forward to it. Another reason that I was excited was because one of the things that we were going to do at Loon Lake was a Pinnacle Pursuits program. Prior to the trip, I went to Pinnacle Pursuits website, and it looked really interesting. Let’s get into the trip
Day 1
When we got to Loon Lake, we were thrust right into the action. We started with a little icebreaker lead by the leader of Pinnacle Pursuits, Jono. The activity was called “The North Wind Blows,” and the premise is that we would all stand in a circle and someone would be in the center. The person in the middle would say “the north wind blows on anyone who …” and then something that they had done. For example, “the north wind blows on anyone who has a dog.” Then, everyone that had done that would swap spots with another person who had. This would result in a new person being in the middle, and they would say another thing, so on ad so forth. I found this activity quite interesting, and thought that it was a great way to get used to the environment and the people we would be working with.
After this, we went to the Panabode, the building where we would be doing most of our learning. After learning more about what kind of learning we would be doing, we did a couple more activities in the Panabode. The two main things that we did were picking a inspirational quote and writing down our goal for the day. My quite was “In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who will inherit the future”, and my goal was to become closer with my classmates and strengthen bonds. After this, we took a key leadership styles test. I found out that I was a challenger and and enabler. After that, we went up to the dining hall where we ate lunch. For the three days that we were with Pinnacle Pursuits we would spend the mornings and evenings in the Panabode doing more textbooks style learning, and the afternoons doing more active outdoor activities. For the outdoor activities, we would split into two groups and do two different activities, and then swap halfway through. On the first day, we did an orienteering exercise and the low ropes course. At the low ropes course, we did an exercise called “Willow in the Wind.” This was a trust fall style exercise. For this, around eight people would stand in a circle around a person in the middle. The person in the middle would then fall into everyones arms and would be pushed around the circle. When we did this exercise, I chose to opt out of it, as I am very scared of trust falls. The other activity that we did at the low ropes course was a wire crossing challenge, where one person would walk across a wire while holding a rope and everyone else would spot them to make sure they didn’t get hurt. The orienteering exercise my group took a little less seriously, and just had fun with it. Here are some photos of these exercises.
The great part about these exercises was that they were all focused around teamwork and trusting each other. I think that this was a very big part of our entire journey with Pinnacle Pursuits. After the low ropes course we went back to the dining hall and ate dinner. After dinner we went back to the Panabode and did an exercise about things that we loved. In this exercise, we didn’t think and just word vomited things that we love. After this, created a poster about ourselves. We then taped up our posters along the walls of the Panabode. Over the course of the rest of the trip, people would write appreciations and acknowledgements on them. After this activity, we found out who we would be sleeping with and went to bed.
Day 2
We started day two at the lake. This was a nice start to the morning, as it was good to get out of the Panabode. We discussed what we would be doing that day, as well as some other activities. After that, we went up to the Panabode, but instead of sitting down and doing more learning in the booklet that we got, we went into an activity with some cards, and a rope. With the rope, we would make a circle and put the cards face down in the middle. Then, in a relay style, each person would take a card out of the circle. The goal was to get all of the cards out of the circle, ordered from ace to king and separated by colour. We did this about five times, and my team improved our time from 1 minute and 47 seconds to 56 seconds. At the start of this, many of our teammates weren’t really paying attention or trying that hard, but by the end, we had improved a lot because everyone started paying attention and trying. After that, we went up to the dining hall and did a building exercise with spaghetti, string, tape and a marshmallow. The goal was to build the highest self standing structure within the time limit. Even though my teams structure wasn’t very tall, we got second because three of the five teams structures fell over. Here are some photos of the activities.
After this, we did a self-reflection questionnaire where we answered some questions about ourself. An example to show what the questions were like is “what would your perfect weekend look like.” After this we returned to the dining hall and had another delicious meal. Our activities for day two were rock climbing and team-building and leadership exercises in the gym. I started in the gym. We did three different activities in the gym. The first activity that we did was a game where we passed a ball in a specific order between everyone as quickly as possible. The method that we started with was just passing the ball in a circle as quickly as possible. The time that we got with this method was 24 seconds. We then tried a different method where we created a ramp with our hands and let the ball roll down. This got us to a time of 6 seconds, a significant improvement. Our large brains then came up with an even better idea where we would create a tower by stacking our hands on top of each other and dropping the ball through them. Doing it like this, we got a time of 2.47seconds. After a little bit more optimization of our method we got our final time of 1.86 seconds. Here is a video of us doing it.
After this we moved to an exercise where we passed a marble between plastic rails and put them into cones across the room. Each time you put the marble in the cone you got a point and the goal was to get as many points as possible in the given time. The group that I was in got 6 points, tying with one of the other groups. After that, one person in each group was blindfolded and we did it again. The person that was blindfolded was chosen by who had lead the group the most the first time we did it. By blindfolding the leader and making them rely on other people, it made the next leader step up to lead the group. Here is a photo of this activity.
The next activity was a memorization and communication exercise where people went up to look at a secret structure made out of lego like blocks in a relay style and then communicate to the rest of the group how to build that shape. Out of the three groups, my group was the only accurate one.
After this, we went up to the climbing wall and did some climbing. Because I do climbing regularly outside of school, the wall was relatively easy and as a result, I didn’t find it that fun. After climbing, we returned to the dining hall for dinner.
After dinner, we picked up where we left off with the self-reflection questionnaire. After finishing the questionnaire, we looked at a list of people, things, and situations and marked if they bring us negative or positive energy, or if it depends. Using the questionnaire and the people situations and things, we started creating our credo. A credo is “A statement of beliefs or values that guides someone’s actions. It is a guiding principle or set of principles. A credo defines what you stand for.” At first, I really struggled with my credo. I wanted to start it right, but I didn’t know how to start it. This resulted in me not starting at all. After not writing anything, we were sent to bed, and I went to sleep, still thinking about my credo.
Day 3
We started the day off at the high ropes course, where we would be doing our afternoon activity. We set a goal for the day and shared it with the group. My goal was to support and encourage my teammates. After this, we went to the Panabode to do our morning learning. We started with a card trading game. Each card had an emotional intelligence trait on it that were split into four groups, Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, and Social Managment. We traded cards with people around the room to find three traits that we felt represented who we were. The three cards that I ended up with were empathy(Social Awareness), collaborative teamwork(Social Management), and building bonds(Social Management). Then, we selected three traits that we wanted to improve at. My three traits were emotional self-awareness(Self-Awareness), emotional self control(Self-Management), and initiative(Self-Management). After this we went to eat lunch.
After lunch we went to our activities. I started at the high ropes course, where there were two different activities, the vines and a milk crate stacking challenge. I found the vines pretty easy, and I didn’t get a chance to do the milk crate stacking.
After that, we went to the Panabode and did some trust fall activities, starting with the willow in the wind exercise that we did on day one, and ending with a trust fall off of a table and a chair(about six feet high). In between these, we did normal trust falls in pairs, and then to about 40 degree falls in groups of 7(1 faller, and 6 spotters). I have historically very afraid of trust falls, so getting from not doing the willow in the wind exercise on the first day to doing the trust fall from six feet high was a really cool experience.
After dinner, we went back to the Panabode and finished our credo. My final credo is as follows.
“I value respect and integrity
I believe in valuing perspectives and being open to different opinions
I foster an environment of emotional vulnerability and self expression
I hold friends and family very close to my heart and believe that people are the best part of life”
After setting down and clearing my head, I was able to write a credo that I think represents me well. This was our last day with Pinnacle Pursuits and Jono, so we did a final activity to finish everything off. We did a crossing the line exercise where everyone was sitting on one side of a rope and people would walk across the room and stand on the other side of a different rope if they had done what Jono said. An example is “stand up and walk across the room if you speak another language fluently.” This was a really interesting activity, and I liked the parallels to the first activity we did and how it brought the experience full circle.
This concluded my experience with Pinnacle Pursuits. I thought that this was a very enjoyable and educational experience. I learned a lot about leadership and teamwork, as well as about myself and my classmates. But the trip isn’t over quite yet.
Day 4
This day is where things started to become a little bit less fun. The main reason that I didn’t enjoy this day as much as the others was because we had to use our iPads. I know that most of our learning in PLP is done on our iPads, but during this trip to Loon Lake prior to this day, I hadn’t used my iPad once, and I was really enjoying the break from screens and the time outside in nature. Using our iPads on this day took away from that, thought we did do some pretty cool things. The first thing that we did was create a Home Screen with our credo on it. This is mine.
After this, we started creating a personal logo. Mine looks like this.
Next, we got a tutorial on how to better use Things. Then we ate lunch. After lunch, we went on a walk around the lake, which took about 2 hours. I had a lot of fun on this walk. It was nice to go hiking in the snow and enjoy the views of the lake. We then ate dinner for the last time this trip.
After dinner we watched Apollo 13. I had seen this movie before, and I was quite tired as a result of not sleeping well on the trip, so I took a quick little nap. After the movie we went to bed, preparing to go home.
Day 5
This day was quite uneventful as all we really did was pack up and go home. We got back to the school before lunch ended, so we had to attend our 4th period class and work on the mountains of homework we missed.
This was an amazing trip and one of the most memorable weeks of my life. The learning and experiences sprinkled with snowball fights, jamming with a guitar, playing cards, and hanging out with friends, coupled with the incredible views and snow made for an incredible overall experience. I learned so much about all of my peers, as well as teamwork and leadership skills, and most of all, I learned a lot about my self. I think that in many ways I am a different person after this trip. Thank you so much for reading my post, and have a great day.
(Photo taken by Faith)
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