Winmarleigh Hall visit a huge success

On Friday, we had a very excited group of Year 3 and 4 children all raring to go for a weekend of adventure and fun. We packed all the bags onto the case and set off for the hour journey. When we arrived we met our groupie for the weekend Bri. She was Australian and it took us a little time to get used to her accent.

After a lovely lunch, we set off for our first activities which were archery and climbing. We learnt how to belay with the ropes so we could help our friends when they were climbing and gave each other lots of encouragement. In archery, we learnt how to hold the bow and secure the arrow before firing. We had lots of misses at first but by the end of the session were hitting the target and even some in the bullseye. Our evening activity was Robot Wars which was great fun. We had to play games to win packaging which we then used to make armour that one of the team had to wear to protect them from the water balloons. The teachers couldn’t help but laugh at seeing the children trying to bend down in their boxes whilst blindfolded. We think there was a little cheating going on as some of us found the water balloons very easily.

Once we had cleared up all the mess and thrown the remaining water balloons at each other it was time to get ready for bed. We had already unpacked our sleeping bags so we found our pyjamas and came out of our rooms for a drink and a biscuit. We had a relatively good sleep even though a spider apparently woke all the girls at 02:50 am!

On Saturday morning, the sun was shining as we went for breakfast and then out onto activities. We had Giant Swing and Canoeing first. The Giant Swing was really high but we weren’t going to be phased by it. It was really hard pulling our friends to the top and the teachers had to help too. When you were at the top you could see for miles and it was scary looking down. We had to pull the release cord before flying back down. Lots of us screamed or closed our eyes especially Miss Joubert and Mrs Batters who screamed louder than anyone else.

Canoeing was also great fun. We learnt how to paddle and steer the boat where we wanted it to go. Mrs Greenwood and Hashim were really quick at paddling but it didn’t stop them getting wet when the instructor flicked water at everyone. We played games where we had to throw a ball into another boat and also tig.
In the afternoon, we had low ropes and orienteering. We really had to work as a team and support each other on the low ropes. We were able to read the map to find the posts around the site and ran off some energy to complete as many as we could.

Our evening activity was Passport to the World where we had to find the flags of different countries around the site and answer the questions about that country to score points for our teams. It was a good test of our general knowledge but we were a little unsure on some of the countries! We were all exhausted by the time we got back to our rooms and fell asleep much quicker than the previous night.

Sunday morning was very windy and cold but at least it was dry. Our last activities of the weekend were High Ropes and Zip Wire. The High Ropes was really tricky because of the wind and we all had a good try even though it was very high. The Zip Wire was a favourite for most of the children and we learnt how to release the ropes from our harness so we could drop back down to the ground at the end of the wire.

We all had an amazing weekend and loved spending time with our friends doing challenging and fun activities. We would like to thank Mrs Batters, Mrs Greenwood and Miss Joubert for taking us on such a memorable and fantastic trip.