Climbing Higher Together – Our Loon Lake Retreat 🧗‍♀️

I had a lot of stuff at Loon Lake to make it feel like home, my books, my music, my friends and *sigh* my sister. Yes we travelled with the grade 8’s and 16 of my classmates to Loon Lake.

Loon Lake?

Loon Lake is a short 2 and half hour drive away and well I mean it’s not as far as Alberta. We were told we would be going to Loon lake in the beginning of November and all we were really told was that the food was an amazing and well honestly that was the most hyped up thing but it was a very unique experience.

PLP comes to Loon Lake to do a program called “Pinnacle Pursuits” where we have all the volunteers help with activities during the days and then we talk with the guy that started it all.. Jono.  Something Pinnacle Pursuits like to focus on is joining everyone together and even though most of us are pretty close we still have little groups and cliques among us. Our goal this trip was to stop that and to all be one big class. I had hoped that this would be achieved and my goal for this week was to try new things with new people, starting a conversation with someone I may not have or sitting somewhere else instead of my usual friends.

VMV Connections:

My mission  on my VMV (vision, mission, values) was never stop learning and to grow into the nest version of myself and I felt that this trip was a great way to act on it. The whole point of our Jono sessions were to better ourselves and to goal set which was another big point on my VMV.

agency: I feel I used my student agency on this field study by taking ownership and responsibility for my own action as we were on a PLP trip where we are representing the school. Leading to the main thing in agency which I felt was goal setting, I was constantly setting goals for myself and acting on them and I am carrying that out now even when not on the trip setting goals and expectations.
Critical Thinking: In my life I never realized how much I use my head to make decisions and how much I think things through  when doing anything. On our Loon Lake retreat during a Jono talk we did an exercise where the was a head poster on a wall, a heart and a gut poster (like the body parts). The exercise was that he would say various situations (a lot of which had to do with DI) and we would walk over to whichever one we would use to make our decision. For example “Your group member is being bullied by another one of your group members what do you do?” I would walk over to gut because what am I feeling in my gut to make this choice. During almost all of the situations I stayed at head, even when he said walk in a pattern of what you would go to then walk to what your would do next I still stayed at head and that might be because I am an overt hiker and tend to put to much thought into things but I found that very interesting.
engagement: I struggle sometimes to engage in group discussions of activities unless of course it’s a competition (and as I have learned from this trip I am highly competitive). I really started to come out of my shell in group activities and later on a few discussions that we would have. I feel I mainly felt this in the trustfall exercise we partook in and I will explain more about that below.

Trustfalling

Everyone’s heard of trustfalling but have you heard of claiming on to a chair to get onto a table to get on  another chair that’s on the table and fall into your classmates arms? Well ya I hadn’t either until we did it in a Jono session.

At the start of the session we were doing some partner trustfalls but as the class went on it turned into much more after being explained what we were doing I decided to do something that was waaay out of my usual comfort zone and that was going first. I don’t know what possessed me to decide to go first but it for sure was fun. Because I was going first I didn’t know what it would be like to do the fall and when I started to climb up I felt a million nerves rushing through my body and when I fell all I felt after was adrenaline. I am glad I went first I tried something new and engaged with my class in a way I definitely wouldn’t have before. I definitely trusted my classmates and I also felt great knowing they trusted me too.

Tightrope

Walking on a rope that is digging into your feet while being supported by 2 classmates is not for the weak.

This was later on in the week and I must have felt pretty brave again and wanted to show I was dedicated to proving my engagement and went first again. This was not as a scary if I am being honest and it just hurt more on my feet. We all had to pull the rope very tight and be a unit and group to work together to help.

We talked about these points in our mini very last minute exhibition and those points were:

TRUST

UNITY

EMPATHY

Our Learning Evidence

This was a poster I made showing things I like to do and it supposed to be a montage of about 30 things and well I drew 5 because I didn’t have time to worm on it and instead I wrote our big poster but people were still kind enough to leave a message on my board :).

This was our duotang (which I haven’t used in forever) that we kept all our workbook stuff in and our goal setting. We did various activities with these an documented the aftermath down to keep progress.

Reflection On Trip:

DQ 🏎️ Question/Answer:

How did this field study change you as a learner and as a community member?

I feel this trip really helped me realize what its like to be apart of a bigger team and community and that the connections and special bonds made on this trip will carry on through future projects that we will work on together. I also feel I can trust that group of people more easily than before like if you had told me before that trip that I would be falling into a bunch of there arms and my life depended on them kinda I would NOT believe you.  Overall I feel this trip forever changed me as a member of this PLP class and I can’t wait to see what we do with what we learned.

Thank you so much for reading! Stay posted for my next post! đź’•

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *