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Grade sevens mark milestone with camp-out

Outdoor education passes from student to student
Chris Bolster

An outdoor education program is helping students mark important milestones.

For three weeks Coast Mountain Academy (CMA) students in grade 12, who are working through a five-month outdoor leadership program, are hosting the Eco-EdVenture camp for School District 47’s grade seven students. The overnight camps run from June 3 to 21 on the grounds of the new Haywire Bay Outdoor Learning Centre on the edge of Powell Lake.

“It’s really their final culminating project,” said CMA coordinator Ryan Barfoot. “They’ve looked at everything going into this from risk management through all the planning.”

Barfoot’s students have been working hard building up their repertoire of outdoor skills over the span of the course and this camp is their opportunity to provide mentorship. CMA students learn a variety of skills: wilderness first aid, canoeing, kayaking, judgement and decision-making and leadership.

Each elementary school sends their grade seven class separately for the overnight and students stay in the newly constructed cabins at the centre. The class is divided into three parts and each part is assigned a male and female CMA student as counsellors. During the camp each group of students is taken through three stations to teach specific lessons. Station one is a canoeing and water safety station where students have the opportunity to go out in the camp’s canoes on the lake. Station two is the wilderness connect station where they learn about the local flora and fauna. Station three is the wilderness survival station where they learn about building shelters out of materials they can find in the woods and how to light a fire with one match.

CMA student Anika Watson was leading up the wilderness safety station when the first grade seven class from Grief Point Elementary made its way though on June 6.

“With a group of students there’s a huge range of experience and it’s challenging sometimes to bring them all together and work with them,” said Watson. “But I think when you do this in a team setting rather than a competitive one it’s easier for the kids to learn from each other.”

Watson said the skills she and her peers are teaching the grade seven students are part of helping them understand more about native plants and how people lived in the wilderness in the past.

“It works really well with school,” she said. “Also there’s the leadership and teamwork skills that students learn while they’re making shelters.”

This experience is not only a great way for CMA students to take the next step in their lives, but also serves to help the grade seven students mark the transition from elementary to high school, said Barfoot.

He enjoys watching his students take what they’ve learned and apply it to the camp. “They’re bundling all that up and plucking from it what they want to deliver to the grade sevens,” he said. “It’s a pretty rich transfer of skills.”