Loon Lake Adventure! 🏞️

How do the choices we make set our future path? That was the question that the entirety of PLP 9 was trying to answer on our trip to loon lake. During our time there, we learned about 5 main subjects to help us answer this question. Emotional Intelligence, Internal Talk, Clear Communication, Social Awareness, and Leadership. Before our trip, I knew nothing about any of these subjects. But as you read on, you will see my growth in my learning about my own self-awareness, social-awareness, etc.

5 Key Subjects

As I mentioned before, I had no previous experience with the 5 main subjects. In loon lake, we took seminars, and participated in activities both indoor and outdoor to help us understand and learn these subjects. All of these activities had one thing in common. They were all team building and bonding activities. Through this camp, I feel that I have bonded with my classmates very much, and I feel that we are more of a team than we were before. I learned that Emotional Intelligence is a skill that we learn, teach, use, and develop all throughout our life, and that we are %85 more likely to use our EI (Emotional Intelligence) than we are to use our IQ in most situations. I learned that Internal Talk is the little voice in our head that helps you reflect on yourself as a person, your self-awareness, and understand your impact on others. I learned that Clear Communication includes expressing your emotions and desires clearly, and Social Awareness includes status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. Last but not least, Leadership. In my opinion, this was our main focus in this program. I learned personally, what skills and abilities I had that could help form and lead a team, and not a group. We learned that a group is a bunch of people with common interests, while a team is people you can put your trust in and work better with. 

Put to Action

To put our learning to action, we participated in different activities such as trust falls off of a chair standing on a table, low ropes course with our peers as support, partnered high ropes course, team crate building. These activities that we participated in really helped reinforce everything that we learned, and helped us bond together as a team. My favorite activity that we did that really helped me bond with people I normally wouldn’t bond with was the low ropes course. I think this was my favorite because it was extremely fun, and since the course was right off the ground we had no harnesses. We had to depend on each other, and put our trust in each other to catch us if we fell. My group set and broke many records in this course, and the fun we all had brought us closer together. 

The Change

At the end of this program, after we had learned and practiced all these new skills, we had to put together an exhibition to present to our parents about everything that we learned. One of the many things that we had to talk about was what new skill we were planning to take home and use from now on. I said that I was going to bring home my reinforced leadership qualities to work with and build teams and not groups both in and out of school. Overall, I think that this experience was and amazing one that definitely help me find out more about myself and others. Now that we are back home, I can’t wait to put the skills I learned to use.