Senior Camps
All senior classes have held camps at Pinedale, Canvastown during Term 1. It is a superb location. We take children on camp for a number of reasons – personal development, social development and academic development. Yes, they are there to learn. It is always terrific to see all the children enjoying camping, and seeing them achieve many personal goals and learn so much. Then the learning about the unit of work continues back at school for a number of weeks.
One of the best outcomes is how the classes gel together into a co-operative, supportive unit. Developing a class culture was successfully promoted and established on all camps. We also managed to have six teachers who have never been to Pinedale, attend camps to learn about the camp site and how to take a camp there in the ‘Richmond School way’.
The focus of the camps was on GOLD and EARLY NELSON/MARLBOROUGH. The children receive many varied experiences such as viewing the historical mural in the Canvastown hall, a tramp to Deep Creek (where the majority of the 50 million dollars of gold – in today’s $$$ was found in the 1860s), visited the Deep Creek cemetery, they panned for gold, they walked through tunnels and trail races, they looked at ‘problem’ plants, seed dispersal, and studied native and exotic plants, they completed an orienteering course and the majority managed to abseiled.
Kevin Melrose (gold-miner and ex-parent) took 6 days off work and went down to all 6 camps to show the children how he sluices for gold and uses high pressured hoses and suction pumps.
I would like to thank all the ‘camp parents’. They were absolutely fantastic. They all ‘mucked in’ helping with the tasks and with humour! They all seemed to enjoy camp and helped make sure the children did too. The Whenua-iti abseiling instructors told me how many schools struggle to get parent help and especially quality help. They spoke highly of our parents.
We were also very fortunate to have the use of covered trailers owned by Brent Palmer – ex-Board chair and Ray White Realty agent and one from Ridgeline Safety Systems (owned by Daniel Shand and Jaime Kingi). Other parents also supplied trailers and took transport. Apples were donated by Heartland Apples for each camp and meat was donated by the Neal family for two camps. A very big ‘THANK-YOU’ to you all.