Santa Monica - Reflections

Two of our Year 9's who recently completed the Santa Monica experience wrote the below reflective pieces on there experience - fantastic to see the postive impact the camp has on students

Hugh Sinnadurai

Santa Monica is a once of a lifetime experience as it is different from all other camps. If you have already been to Santa, you would probably know that the staff there talk a lot about listening and how to improve on your learning skills to become a better student and more importantly a better person overall. It’s fair to say a lot of us struggled with this for the first one or two weeks but by the end of the experience I am able to say that our classes behaviour has improved greatly. The camp is a fun but also hard experience due to many cleaning duties and gardening duties, those might sound annoying but when you get home you will be happy that you did them as when you get home you will take more pride in your room and be more resilient overall. On the camp you get to take part in many different activities such as surfing, hiking, camping, mountain bike riding and late-night tag with your mates proving to be the best game on camp. A great thing about camp is also the food as all meals are one to remember thanks to the camp chef David. During the 4 weeks you get to know your class much better than if you were just going to school with them. I’m not too sure about how other classes went but I’m very sure that our class has become more trusting, friendly and we have built great teamwork skills.

Tyler Fitzpatrick

In this Newsletter I’m going to be sharing some of class 9G’s favourite memories from Santa Monica with you. Firstly, if you want to be a part of the team you have to learn quickly what's acceptable and unacceptable behaviour and be tolerant of others. Our class learnt a great life lesson in resilience, especially when one of our classmates’ tents went flying high above the gumtrees at 2 in the morning and ended up upside down. I doubt that this was a highlight of his Santa Monica experience however, he proved to us that even in extreme circumstances we have the inner strength to adapt whenever something goes wrong. On camp we did many fun activities. Some of these include surfing, mountain bike riding, hiking, camping, making our own food on Trangia’s and kayaking. Even though these were fun we also had to do things that weren’t as fun such as spreading mulch, cleaning out the buses and feeding the chickens - on Santa Monica, our class didn’t like these things at all however, now I’m back to normal school I realise that doing these things was helping us prepare to do things that we don’t want to do and it was making our class better listeners overall. All in all, we had a great character-building experience that made us much tighter as a class and I highly recommend the Santa Monica experience.