Advance. This word means to move forward in a purposeful way. PLP 8 and 9 were invited to go on a Learning Advance at Loon Lake. We spent four days experiencing different activities, and learning in a different environment which moved our growth as learners forward. Where is Loon Lake? This is a small isolated lake near Maple Ridge that has a camp called Loon Lake Retreat Centre.  This would be the location of our first ever, and hopefully not our last, field school!

Over the course of the trip we were working on a book using an app called Book Creator to record and reflect on our daily activities. I chose to not bring my phone to all the activities because I wanted to be experiencing the experience and not be distracted. This did affect the design content for my book because I did not have pictures or videos of all my activities I had to be a bit creative.

My experience with our advance was positive and this experience connected to my learning plan in a few ways. First of all in my learning plan I talked about areas that I need to improve. One of my Humanities goals was: to stretch out of my zone I need to communicate more with classmates. I believe I accomplished this at the Loon Lake Advance as I communicated with my teammates during games and activities, I got to know my classmates more, and I got to know some grade 8’s more. When I look at the collaborating core competency, I think about the shelter building activity. We had to build a type of shelter in the forest using logs and sticks that we found in the forest with a team. My team worked really well together because we communicated and we listened to each other’s ideas. We created a strong and large shelter. For the creative thinking competency, I think the shelter building also used this skill and I think we also used this when we needed to figure out clues to find different buildings. For the personal and social competency, there was a lot of growth. During COVID I have not been able to develop this skill outside of school. Just sharing a room and a cabin with classmates (very loud people) gave me an opportunity for growth. In the future, I will write down more of what we did so that I can better reflect on what we did. I also feel like I need to go to future field school with the goal to talk to the teachers more. On this trip, I did get very stressed about DI and in the future, I will go and talk to someone about it. One thing that I loved about this trip is that I tried and participated in everything. I even went to the gym to play basketball even though most of my friends did not. The only thing that would have made it better? TEA in the morning. My brain did not function for the first three hours of the day. Future Field Schools must include morning tea.