Middle School News

Thalgarrah - Years 5 & 6

On Thursday 20 June students in Years 5 and 6 travelled to Thalgarrah Environmental Education Centre. They participated in the Kids verses Wild program channelling their inner "Bear Grills" to complete a range of challenges and pushing themselves out of their comfort zones. 

Below is a recount of the day written by Amara McFarlane:

On Thursday 20 June, our Year 5-6 students went on an exciting excursion to Thalgarrah, which is located on the other side of Armidale. We sat patiently on the bus for around 45 minutes before we arrived. As soon as we got there, we put our bags down and headed into the classroom.

Mr Mackenzie, the principal of Thalgarrah, explained the types of challenges we would have to overcome. Then he showed us how to use a map and how to line up your compass with your map. We put ourselves into groups of 4 and set off on an adventure, everyone wandered into the bush.

Our map had locations marked on it, at each of those locations were materials that could be useful in the future. Each group did things like; finding items with their symbol stuck to it, collecting a bucket of water from the dam and walking through the forest.

Once all the groups finished their first task Mr Mackenzie made us eat a whole apple including the seed and the core! He challenged us to build shelters with the only clue being a storm is coming in from the East. We had only 10 minutes and the stuff we collected from challenge 1. When the timer went off, Mr Mackenzie threw the bucket of water onto our shelters to see if we would survive the rainstorm from the East.

On our way back to the school type buildings we grabbed firewood for our next challenge. As you could probably guess, our next challenge was making a fire using flint and steel. When we had our fires we could cook sausages for lunch ourselves. They were very delicious and filled us up, but we still ate our sour gummy worms on the way out. 

Thalgarrah was a very fun place to visit and an excursion we will never forget. We were so happy to go there.