Have you ever thought of climbing a big rock wall in school?, well neither have I, and you can imagine how surprised I was to find out that we were going to be do this and more in Loon Lake.  A few weeks a go we went to Loon Lake to learn about different skills in life or team building exercises.

one of the biggest things that we worked on there was trust and as you probably guessed, yes we did a trust fall, but I’ll get into that later. In Loon Lake we spent a lot of our time in Pan Abode, this was a big room where we did lots of learning and skill teaching. On the first day we got an explanation of what it will be like for the next 5 days and it was brief but I do think that I was still very surprised by all the things we did later on, we also did a few exercises where we pair up and play rock paper scissors, made shapes in groups of 4 or standing in a circle and saying “the sun shines on those who_____”. These were very simple and easy but we didn’t know what was coming.

In the next 2 days we did more activities in pan abode and I learn a lot about my peers and I gained more trust in them when we did the rock wall, everyone was cheering everyone on and supporting each other, in a meeting with Jono we got to talk about what you think is most important in life and lots of people said friends or family and I agree but i also think that your own excitement os most important.  We did a few more exercises after that but then we  moved on to the low ropes course and this was also a very supportive and helpful environment because like I said before everyone was very supportive.

We were then nearing the end of the trip and we started doing more thoughtful exercises and we did. One I especially thought we all learnt about ourselves, we all went into the gym and sat on one side of the room and Jono would read questions and if the answer was yes you would walk to the other side of the room an I will say I thought this connected us all in a more personal way. We also made a big hexagon connection about all of our individually hexagons, these were later put up on the wall for when our parents came to see what we learnt.

Overall we did too many things to put in one post but I thought I covered the main ones. I learnt lots of new team building skills and just life skills but I really thought that the main thing that stuck with me is something that Jono said and that’s to “ make a team not a group” because when you make a group of friends you wont get any new ideas or perspectives because you all think and act the Sam, that’s why you’re friends, but I really think that there were a lot of brand new skills that I would have never learnt without this experience and I am very thankful to all of the teachers who came and helped me and my friends learn all these important skills.