Hello everyone, welcome back to my blog! Today is a more special blog post: I’m going to be talking about my very first field study, the Loon Lake Learning Advance! In this post, I’m going to be reflecting on my learning while I was there.

Day 1

We started this day at school. The assignment of our Book Creator book was introduced to us. At around 12:30, we left the school and started heading towards Loon Lake. As soon as we got there, we went to the amphitheatre and went on our photo walk. I took photos of different parts of nature during this walk.

In order to get to the path, we had to pull a cool rope barge.

After our photo walk, we went on a ‘quest’ to get used to the area. At one of the clues, we took a photo of ourselves as a human totem pole. 

My team for this activity was Daniel, Caitlin, Kira, and Hannah.

After that, we settled into our cabins. I shared a room with Kira, Brooke, Kai, and Gwenyth. Once we put our stuff away, we headed to the gym for a team building activity. Our activities included a few games. For the first one, we had a partner and we walked around the gym alone until Mr. Harris called out a scenario (for example, a frog on a log,) and we had to find our partner and act out the scene. Another game we played was a fun drawing game. We sat in a circle with a small group and had a piece of paper and a marker for each person. We drew one shape 3 times on our piece of paper, and passed it to the next person. Then you draw different shapes on the paper passed to you, and so on. We ended up with some fun artwork.

After we did these activities, we ate dinner. We had some delicious lasagna! Once dinner was over, we had evening fun. I chose to do games night and I had fun playing cards. After evening fun, we had our first advisory group. We called our group the Wolvefishes.

After advisory, we went to sleep, excited for the next day.

Day 2

On day 2, we woke up bright and early to have a delicious pancake and french toast breakfast. Directly afterwards, we had advisory. After advisory, we headed to the forest to build shelters. My group for this activity was Daniel, Callum, and Chris. 

After that, we did our first learning block with Mr. Harris. In this lesson, we learned all about the NAME acronym to determine historical significance: N-novelty, A-applicability, M-memory, and E-effect. I think I did really well in this activity because I was an active listener throughout the video we watched. We had a productive conversation about the NAME technique and events throughout history that I took a big part in. Anyways, after all of these events, I had the DI Sweatbox. Basically this was an activity where way too many kids chill in a room with a painfully hard floor and no chairs to work on Destination Imagination for 2 hours straight. So that was SUPER fun. My team finalized our script and practiced it, so at least the painfully slow 2 hours weren’t completely in vain. After this we had free time and finished the part of the day where we had to think properly with dinner. After dinner, we had evening fun, where I played cards again, and then advisory. With that, we finished our day.

Day 3

We started day 3 with breakfast at 7:45 again. (I call a riot. We should’ve eaten later!) After that, we had advisory as usual, and started our thinking time. Our first non-routine activity was silent ball in the gym. After that, we had another lesson with Mr. Harris on how to mask with the app SuperimposeX.

Next, we ate lunch and continued with yet another DI Sweatbox. We continued practising and improving our script until we moved on to free time and then dinner. After dinner, we had advisory and then our final evening fun, which was a movie night. We watched Back to the Future. After that, we went to sleep our final night at Loon Lake.

Day 4

On day 4 we started our day with breakfast 15 minutes early (seriously, why did we have to wake up so early ahhhh!) After breakfast, we had our final advisory, and then packed up our stuff. Finally, we played capture the flag (grade 8’s vs grade 9’s) and finished everything up with chicken burgers for lunch. After that we loaded back onto the buses and headed back to school.

Overall, I loved going to Loon Lake! I learned all about historical significance, and my knowledge on SuperimposeX is much more vast than before (though I didn’t know anything beforehand.)

Finally, I can’t forget my book! During our time at Loon Lake, we worked on a book in the app Book Creator about our time there. Here it is!