task 1 Josh Broyda

My first two weeks at school (task 1) By Josh Broyda

“Ima Slap you……..”  were the first words that my friends said to me as I stepped into school on the first day back.  I’m not new to Reddam so the whole experience wasn’t that frightening for me I knew all the same people and all the staff. Basically, I knew everything about the school and how boring it can be...I started to mingle as you would on the first day back but then i heard shouts “CLASS TIME GET TO YOUR CLASSES” and then i began to  panic. I did not know what to expect...fortunately for me nothing happened.

As I was getting ready to go to bed that evening, the phone suddenly rung. I soon found out it was Jordan who called me because he wanted me to help him DJ at the Swimming Carnival. The next day was just awesome, it was one of those fun school days because we had the Swimming Carnival. I was very excited because I had been training for this day for a long time. Overall, I was happy because I came 3rd in Freestyle and 2nd in Backstroke for my year group.

The next 3 days were one of the most funnest in my life. The reason for this was that it was the Reddam Year 7 camp. But this was no ordinary camp, it was the best 3 days of my life with many, many fun events. One such activity was the Flying Swing, which I highly recommend to anyone. Basically, i was attached to a harness and the entire group had to pull me up 15.6 m high into the air. As I reached this level, i had a decision to make. I had to either pull the rope causing me to quickly swing down towards the ground or stay at 15.6m for the rest of my life. I decided to tug on the rope and for a few seconds i was flying in the air. It was just an unreal feeling...

On Monday, it was time for school to really begin. We were given a 10 day sheet with all our classes and we had to follow it like it was our leader. One such class was English, a subject i was a little scared of and when the teacher walked into the classroom, my whole class was nervous. However after a few minutes, it became obvious that this man was in fact one of the most epic teachers that i had ever met in my life. He taught our class many cool ways to use things in context, for example “I went to Woolworths yesterday and guess what the near queue was just ridiculous so I had to go to the far queue“. When the class first heard him say this, most of us didn't understand what he was talking about. However a few minutes, after much discussion we all began to laugh.

So far, Reddam in 2011, has been very exciting and enjoyable. I hope the rest of the school year can be as good as the last two weeks have been.

My Experience at Camp

                                          Monique Belovukovic

What I’ve realised in the first couple of weeks is that Reddam is a whole new world full of different people, a different environment  and  intense homework. I know that Reddam was the best school for me right form first second of orientation. The things that really helped me get into the school is new friends I made from camp at Cataract Scouting Park. If there wasn’t camp it would be a whole lot more different. So far camp has been the highlight of year 7 2011.

Camp started with everyone gathering at school to catch a bus leaving at 9:00 in the morning.  Everyone was exhausted but so excited. During our camp we enjoyed the outdoors, we noticed there was mud everywhere.  My friends and I gathered together pumped up to get muddy and dirty.

One of my Grand activities I did first was Caving. Caving was never what I expected. I thought it was like walking through a rocky underground tunnel full of rats and dirt. So thinking this I was terrified until I saw the entrance door I was extra terrified.

It looked like I could’t crawl inside the entrance door and possibly  slide to enter. Alicia our team leader kept telling us that the biggest loser (TV show) had no problem with finishing it but that was pretty hard to believe. Just imagine all the creatures you would be with in the tunnel like spiders, geckos, crickets and other insects maybe even snakes.

I stood right in the middle where I knew I would be safe with one of my good friends Rachel and another boy I met called Noah. It was dark and tight, extremely hot inside the cave all I could feel was my sweat trembling down my burnt, warm face. I was so uncomfortable but so happy when I saw light from a distance. I started to speed up my  crawling untiI I could stand. I was nearly outside while hearing a yell “who’s ready for level two”, my lungs felt like they dropped. My eyes couldn’t help notice the scratches and blood mark on my back. I felt like whingeing but than I saw everyone with the same problem.

Level two was the same thing until the very end were we got to a point where we couldn’t climb jump or slide, so we waited until everyone caught up. We were now all hot and scared. Alicia was trying to tell us that the brick wall moves if we push really hard and work as a team. So we all started to push hard until I saw in the corner of my eye steps leading up to a small rabbit hole. Next thing you know we hear Alicia’s voice coming from the rabbits whole “coming or not”. So we followed her in, everyone had trouble fitting through. We waited twenty minutes for everyone to squeeze through. I couldn’t believe I got through level one and level two. It was tough but somehow I finished it. I was very happy and proud.

One of my other favourite activities was The Giant Swing. It was amazing but very scary. I didn’t want to do it at first but then Rachel kept whispering you will regret it. So I put my helmet and harness taking my time.  I walked up the ladder as if I was an elephant step by step. They took the ladder away. I was now hanging on the rope, five metres above the ground with a massive wedge. They attached me to the rope and told me to hold on tight. They raised me higher and higher until I screamed “ stop”! I was around fifteen metres above the ground when count down started for the giant swing. My mouth immediately became dry from nervousness. My heart was pounding at full speed. I pulled the blue rope and woof,  off I went. It wasn’t scary at all. So our team leader told me I could have another go if I go all the way to the top, which was around thirty metres high. For me that was extremely high. I closed my eyes stop breathing went red and pulled the blue rope. All I could hear was the wind in my ears and me screaming.

Camp was a life changing experience that will stay in my mind forever. I also made lots of friends from my cabin .I now know that I want to be in Reddam all the way through until year twelve.

Task 1: Camp Dylan Chilchik

We were walking down that long, tiring hill. I could feel the sweat running down my face from the extremely hot sun. I never thought that I would ever actually miss the rain and the coolness. I was walking with my two friends Dario and Jared. We all knew what was ahead of us but you could tell we were still very nervous. I knew that there was no danger and that we would be connected to harnesses, but I couldn’t help thinking of falling helplessly until finally hitting the rock solid earth.

“We’re nearly there,” I heard our instructor, Dan, call out. This made me excited because it was our last activity on our school camp and it was also that one that I wanted to do the most. Plus, I was really tired of walking.

We talked quite a lot on the way there. We just talked about how high we thought it would be and if we would go to the very top. We hadn’t seen it yet but we heard it was extremely tall.

Suddenly, there was a huge opening from all the trees and we saw what we came for. The Giant Swing. It was huge! I thought there was no way that we could swing connected to a rope all the way from the top and just keep swinging. I was more nervous then before but my excitement definitely overpowered that. I couldn’t wait to experience the amazing feeling of falling. Sadly, I had to wait my turn like everyone else.

Dave gave us all numbers for the order of who goes first. I was number 15. I was happy that I was able to see people go on it before me but also upset that I had to wait a while for my go. So the first people started putting on their harnesses while Dave told us how the whole thing worked. “ We will pull the person up with the orange rope. Once at the top, there is a little blue rope that the person will pull and it will release them and they will fall and swing. I’m sure you will all enjoy this activity.”

Finally, after the safety brief, we got started and the first person was connected to the huge rope that would pull them up. It took very little time to pull the person up, and soon enough they were at the top ready to go. Dan counted down from ten and as he said the last number, the person pulled the little blue rope and they fell. It was amazing to watch. They first drop looked amazing and you could tell it was fun from the noise the person was making.

From then on it was a slow wait. One person got off, one person got on. It was fun to see each person’s reaction. Eventually I saw my friend Dario was harnessed up and ready to go. I wanted to see him go because he said he wasn’t going to hold onto the rope when he dropped. No one so far had let go of the rope on the first drop. He connected himself to the harness and up he went. Again we started to hear the count down Dan had said for every single person. Dan said the last number and Dario pulled the rope. Nothing happened. He tried again and still nothing happened. He then tried one more time and it worked. He fell and his hands weren’t on the rope!

He was the first person to let go of the rope on the first drop. Dan told me to go put on a harness. I was really nervous because when Dario came to take off his harness his face was pale. He told me it was amazing and that I had to let go of the rope on the first drop. I said I would.

The next person went and got off and then it was my turn. I was shaking a little bit. Dan connected me to the harness and everyone started pulling and I was lifted into the air. From the ground it didn’t look as high as it was when you’re up there. I finally reached the top. Dan asked if I was ready and I said yes so he started counting down from ten. As he reached the last number I pulled the little blue rope. I didn’t expect to fall on the first try but I did. It was the most amazing feeling. I didn’t hold onto the rope. Every single thing in my body told me to grab the rope but I knew I would regret it later.

When you fell it felt like you lose your breath and fall into your own peaceful place and the whole world disappears. But before you know it the whole thing is over and you are taking off your harness.

I had butterflies in my stomach for the rest of the day and whenever I think about I feel the same thing. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever done in my life. I will never forget it.

Ethan Davis Autobiographical Assesment

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ASSESSMENT – ETHAN DAVIS

HIGH SCHOOL:

DAY 1: It was the first day of high school, I had a new uniform, new books, a locker, a timetable and suddenly it seemed I was responsible for way too many things. Although, this day I only really needed a pencil and a rubber, today was assessment day, I couldn’t believe it an assessment on the first day! It seemed that all the nightmares of high-school were becoming reality.  Although it wasn’t the most pleasant start to high school, it felt good to get it over and done with.

DAY 2: The Swimming Carnival! Everyone was rushing around all in our different coloured shirts: Red – Darling, Blue – Piper, Yellow – Bennelong and the best house Macquarie which was green. The whole school crammed into about 6 buses and drove to Drummoyne Olympic Swimming pool.  The whole senior school was there. I competed in all the races except for breaststroke (I was buying chips) and did pretty well in the end. I think I had two 1^st places and a 3^rd. In the end Bennelong won (for the first time ever).

DAY 3: Camp on the third day of school, after 1 day of exams and 1 day of swimming, everyone was getting pretty tired, and now camp, what could be worse. The bus ride took about two hours so we got there at about 9:30ish. We had lunch got our cabins then it was straight up activities. My first one was the flying fox, which was cool because you just glide along the tree canopy for about half a minute. It was boiling hot though so we spent a lot of time sitting down. After the flying fox it was Orienteering, we split up into groups of four and had to try to find our way around the campus which was by the way humongous. My group failed, really badly I think in total we found one marker. We had dinner, Spaghetti Bolognaise which was surprisingly good considering that it was camp food. We had a night activity after which was probably the highlight of the day, a waterslide. The water was nice and cool and outside it was dark and humid which made for the perfect mix. All my mates went in a massive bunch and we pushed, talked and fighted all the way down, it was really fun.

DAY 4: We woke up early after a night full of eating lollies and talking about surfing and what not. For breakfast we had hot breakfast: eggs, bacon, toast and then there were many different types of cereal: Nutri Grain, Weet–Bix and Cornflakes etc. After finishing our food we got into our groups (I was in group 2) and then set off on our long walk to rock-climbing it was another boiling hot day and everyone was really tired and just wanted to sit down in the shade and have a cold shower. Finally after the rock-climbing was over we walked back up the hill to have our lunch break which was just outside of where our next activity would be taking place, caving. After filling up on Gatorade we put on our helmets, got out our torches and went into the pitch black, windy, rocky tunnels. At least it was shady because I don’t think that anyone could have stayed in the sun any longer, it was 42·C with no wind.

Caving for me was the best activity at the whole camp because we were just able to wonder of in all of these side passages that were really challenging to get through. Me being a skinny kid, I thought that I won’t have to squeeze too much to fit in the tunnels but in some cases I was crawling along the ground and getting soaked in the wet mud. It was heaps fun. I can’t remember all of the activities after that but I can remember doing the waterslide that night, that waterslide once again put everyone in a good mood before bed, except for the fact the fact that I got bitten over and over by mosquitoes.

DAY 5: The last day! I think everyone was pretty happy to go home, but this last day wasn’t just going to be a bus ride home, we had 2 of what I thought were the best activities planned.  Giant Swing and Challenge Valley. First up was Challenge Valley, a massive obstacle course, I thought it would just be a few logs here and there but there  but there were massive nets to climb and massive water ditches to swim through, it really was challenging. Then the final activity, Giant swing. I was pretty pumped for it it was 12m above ground as tall as all of the trees that surrounded it when you reached the top. So what happened is you were harnessed on to a rope and then you were pulled right to the top by everyone else in the group, you then oulled another short rope that released you, it was cool cause you free-falled for about 3 seconds which feels a lot longer when your up there and you just kept on swinging until all your momentum was gone. It was finished, we could finally go home. We packed our belongings said goodbye to the instructors and caught the back home. It was a really fun trip in all.

GEMMA EAGLE task 1

Year 7 Camp  Task 1

On the 2nd of February Year 7 went on camp. To say I enjoyed every second of it would be a lie, to say I didn’t enjoy any of it would also be a lie. To say there were moments when you felt fear, nervousness and shock, would not be a lie but the truth.

The Giant Swing was an example of fear. Harnessed, you were pulled up in the air and then were to pull a rope dangling in front of you to come down making it the giant swing. Down on the ground, it looked a lot less high up than it did in the air. 1,2,3 pull. Swinging through the air with the wind blowing all around you is an amazing feeling, but coming to a stop with a camp instructor grabbing your feet is not quite as amazing as the first part of the experience.

One of the other coolest activities was most definitely caving. Torch, helmet, and the knowledge that there were going to be itsy bitsy gaps to squish through were all you went in with. The caves in Cataract Scout Park were the tiniest little caves I have ever seen let alone had to crawl through. Crawling along the ground in the light of torches, listening to the sound of people yelling at you to hurry up, not being able to see where you are putting your hands is a very interesting thing to do. At one stage during the caving, I put my hand on what I thought was a slug, later I was told it was in fact a leach! Not exactly what you want to hear on your second day of camp when you still had Challenge Valley to go.

Orienteering. Compass, map and a group full of people whom half of us held the map upside down. The map being upside down, and not knowing which needle in the compass pointed north, its no wonder we got lost and only found two of the ten pointers. Orienteering was hilarious and tiring and most of all HOT. The temperature was unbelievable so we found our way back to the scout hall less than half way through the time limit we had. In the scout hall we suggested playing sleeping lions and that’s what we did. It was relaxing!

The other activity I enjoyed the most was the waterslide! I think I enjoyed it because all the groups were there not just the people in my group. Because everyone was there it was more fun and I met a lot of new people at the waterslide. I came to Reddam knowing ten people and because of camp I know everybody in our year. Also the waterslide was fun because it was a waterslide!!! Of course it was going to be fun, especially when you could go down in chains.

Year seven camp was a great experience. Full of laughs, making new friendships, mud, amazing activities and most of all FUN!!! All I can say is I cant wait for year eight camp next year!

Task 1 Sam Newton

What you are reading is a recount of my first two weeks of school in year seven.

I am writing this paragraph on the first day of the third week of school which, I will point out here, is the school’s Valentine’s Day celebration and I would like to say that the next year nine girl who tries to kiss me is going to get it in the kidneys!  Now that I have cleared up the dates I will begin to tell you about my first two weeks at school.

I would like to say that I was looking forward to the first day of school and I was looking forward to a new year, but I think I will be honest.  Going back to school after the holidays, especially the Christmas holidays is very stressful.  Around the second last week of the holidays my mother will say ominously,  “It is time to prepare for school.” This means going to the uniform shop (I won’t express my views about the uniform shop because I would probably get expelled) and then sorting through the new equipment like a man looking for a needle in a haystack.  When this is done the remaining days of the holidays have passed and it’s time to go to school.

You can imagine my excitement when I was told that in the high school there is a reward for winning the house competition so when I learned that my team, Bennelong, had won the swimming carnival I was pretty excited.  Another reason I liked the swimming carnival was that I made two new friends although, because I’m not the greatest swimmer, I only went in the participation races. This is a race where you swim simultaneously with many other people.  The objective, to the casual observer, seems to be to inflict head injuries on the other swimmers, but it is not that.  All you have to do is get to the other side of the pool as many times as possible before the time runs out.

I will now turn my attention to my experiences at camp.  I loved the activities at camp. There is something I enjoy about being able to fit through opening in caving and climbing under ledges in rock climbing while everyone else falls or gets stuck.  It seems like the objective of these activities is to make unfit kids look very disheveled, like they have been left outside in acid rain.  I enjoyed the camp until I learned that the cabins were basically asylums.  I should not have been surprised; in the past I have not been in a single cabin where everyone did what was sensible – go to sleep.  As far as I can tell, no-one at camp sleeps. The crazy people are awake because they think knocking the doors of the sensible people down is more important than sleep, the sensible people are awake because of the crazy people and the teachers are awake because they are trying to make the crazy people go to bed.   I got my own back at caving.  When I saw the tired faces of these people after we had gone through a particularly small and dusty opening in the cave they looked like mobile sand dunes.  The giant swing was fun, but I didn’t like pulling people up to the top. If I had made it I would have added a winch.  Challenge Valley was everything you want from an outdoor adventure: fun, exciting and… muddy.  The hardest part was crawling through pipes half filled with muddy water.  It was just my luck to get the pipe that sloped downwards so you had to swim under water for the last metre while being terribly afraid that you would come up too early and hit your head on a pipe or come up too late and hit your head on the bank.  Don’t try to tell me about living life on the edge!  I will remember Challenge Valley long after I get this mud out of my ears, and if I take enough showers, people might start sharing elevators with me again.

There’s not much to tell about my second week at school. I was trying to think of something to put here when I realized I was just about running out of space.  So I will finish by saying that even though I have poked some fun at the school system in these few paragraphs I am looking forward to the year.

Task 1: Sam Razzaghipour

Task1 Sam R!
My First Two Weeks
At Reddam House

Hi, my name is Sam and I’m going to tell you about my first 2 weeks at Reddam House middle school. I didn’t really like school before I came to Reddam, but now I want to literally live at school and changed my perspective of school forever, it gave me a fresh fun and brand new perspective to the way I saw school. Before I came to Reddam I was afraid I was going to be the school punch-bag and everybody was going to bully me because that’s exactly what I was before when I was in primary school.
The best thing by far what I have done in the past 2 weeks of high school is camp specifically the Giant Swing and the Flying Fox. I will first explain to you the Giant Swing. This is the biggest highlight my first 2 weeks, first you have to put in an harness and helmet and I had to wait though because I was second and there was somebody in front of me and that somebody was Ruby and she is a good friend. Then when it was my turn I had to go up to the 4th step of a ladder which Zack brought for me, then my instructor Dan hooked me up to a huge tangle of rope and wires. After that I leant back held up by the rope I was pulled up by my group and Mr Garrett and when I was in the middle of the 3 biggest swing poles in the state I was told to pull a blue rope towards me and unknowingly I was let go and held by one rope with no hands I glided through the air at 100kmph and now I had part of the wonderful taste of parachuting from a plane.
Now I will tell you about the flying fox, this is practically the everyday version zip line of the ones that you see on TV, I had to wait about half an hour for everyone else to go and I gave all my turns to others, but there was a reward in it 2 full pages of mini-merits and I got to run back the zip-lines, while I was waiting I was talking to Mr Garrett asking if we could race each other but Mr Garrett didn’t get a chance to zip-line and I also talked to our secondary instructor Albert who was apparently an English raised child. When it was my turn to go I went with Don who was afraid of heights when we went up the 3 storey ladder and got hooked up we jumped and we both were hi-fiving each other and felt like supermen and when we got down everyone in the group told Don that he would have liked it and he agreed with them and I was joining in with the crowd.
Thanks for Reading! Bye!