Our Camp Experience

By: Tania and Felicia

This year the St. Anthony's Year 5 and 6s journeyed to ‘The Ranch’ on the Mornington Peninsula for camp. During this experience, we participated in many new and fun activities that helped boost our confidence and made us step out of our comfort zones.

We began our trip to camp by taking a bus ride for roughly an hour and ten minutes. We stopped on the way at Cape Schanck Lighthouse to have a snack. After that, we headed back onto the bus to travel to The Ranch. Once we got there, we got off the bus and grabbed any suitcase we saw and rolled it into the little hall they had. After a few quick safety instructions, we started our first activities of the day.

For our activities, we were split into six groups which were all named after famous horses (real and fictitious). Some of the group names were Maximus, Bullseye, Topthorn, Pharlap, Joey and Warrior’. Our groups were named after horses because we had been reading about War Horse and learning about horses in World War One.

At camp there were many different activities to complete. This included archery, horse riding, the leap of faith, rocking climbing, an initiatives course, bush cooking, and mountain boarding. We were meant to do an activity called crate stacking but it was too windy, so we did the rock climbing instead.

My favourite activity (Tania) was archery. I didn’t think I would be good at archery, but I was actually ok at it. It was fun trying to shoot an arrow as far as possible. My arrow flew over the paddock fence! The leap of faith activity was the most challenging because it was hard to climb up the pegs on the tower and then jump off the top of the platform. I was a bit too nervous to try and touch the orange ball when I jumped so I just did a little jump from the platform. Rock climbing was memorable because everyone was cheering on their teammates when they got stuck on the wall. Most people ended up climbing higher than what they thought they would.

My favourite activity (Felicia) was horse riding. It was a new experience for me. I rode a horse called Frenchie. We rode through an obstacle course, and I had to try and steer Frenchie through it by pulling on the reins. I also got to groom a horse named Chloe by brushing her coat. It was fun to watch everyone riding the horses and trying to get them to move forwards by clicking their tongues. Like me, a lot of students had never ridden horses before. On the second night of camp, we went on a night walk. We tried to listen for different animal sounds, but the wind made it hard to hear. On our night walk, we followed a horse trail which meant everyone was trying really hard to avoid stepping in horse poo!

By Felicia and Tania

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