Sixth Form Enrichment Day
The early morning greeted us with grey skies and heavy rainfall, but that wasn’t enough to wash away the excitement of the day to come. On our arrival at Stubbers Activity and Adventure Centre, we were arranged into our nine groups – the groups that we would spend the entire day with. It is certainly fair to admit that, initially, most of us would have preferred to be in other groups, preferably with our friends, but at the end of the day, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Each group was tasked with four activities; rafting, jet skiing or banana boating, rock climbing and team challenges. My group began the day with rafting, which certainly put our collaboration skills to the test. With help from our guide, we were able to ‘build’ a raft which we then used to set sail onto the river. Most of our time on the water was spent exchanging meaningless screams of terror, paddling in the wrong direction and laughing at the other groups as they fell into the river. Fortunately, my group was one of the lucky ones, with only two people falling into the river – one of those two people being me. Ending the day with a pair of drenched clothes was completely inevitable.
The day taught me a lot about my fellow peers, as I was introduced to the disparity between everyone – those who are competitive by nature, those who are far too easily excited, those who possess brilliant leadership skills and those who are simply able to come up with logical decisions. We also learned the importance of building trust and developing good communication skills, which are, of course, important in all aspects of life. The beauty of working together involves the difference in personalities; we each had individual attributes to offer, which surprisingly complemented each other well and enabled us to work effectively as a cohesive team.
And with a much smaller year group, it’s safe to say that this enrichment day allowed us to become a lot closer as a whole, despite knowing each other for five years. The first week of Year 12 was certainly one to remember and it was, quite possibly, the best way to begin the new academic year.
