Brentwood Preparatory School Magazine

Brentwood School Preparatory A Fly on the Wall - Year Six 70 Enrichment Week Bushcraft This was it. It was the week. Enrichment Week was here. Year 6 being sent away in the middle of the forest for a week. Learning the way of survival by the Bushcraft Company….. As we got near to camp we smelt the delicious smells of the food being cooked! The food at Bushcraft was a real variety! From pancakes to salmon, pizza to brownies every day was something different! My favourite meals were the pizza (I had peppers and sweetcorn on mine), the pancakes, fajitas and the salmon. I didn’t really like the porridge! There were also new flavours I never had before like goat and deer! There were also rich brownies and boiling hot chocolate and biscuits! The food was generally nice with a burst of new flavours in my mouth. We would normally share riddles at meal times with the tribe leaders. We were split into tribes at Bushcraft. My tribe was called The Bras (odd name, I know!) with our tribe leader Ambra. The rest of the tribes were called; Banta Blobs, Dawn of the Lions, Popadoms and The Rainbow Falcons. Our tribe leader was called Ambra, who was very funny. We came up with a really weird song that went “WE ARE THE BRAS WE COME FROM MAAARS…….” Each activity, we split into our tribes and did the activity. At the end of the week we had the Bushcraft Challenge and we were victorious and won! Normally the tribe leaders would tell us off for chatting at night! The tents were big and TARDIS like. Once we got in we found insects, bugs, insects. Insect repellent was used regularly! The first night, I slept in the tent with two other people (the rest had gone to the shelters). One of the funny bits at night was when I couldn’t find Jacob and when I did I whispered “ I feel a human!”. It was freezing at night and all the other tents kept chatting. All the other nights I slept in the shelter which was surprisingly warmer! You could hear rabbits and other animals creeping around you and something was on the back of our shelter! It got light at 4:30am so the chatting started then. After some very angry, tired tribe leader warnings, it stopped! Normally, at home I would sleep for ages, and not find a snail on my face or a cricket in my bag! Little did we know how tired you would get doing activities…. The games at Bushcraft included Predator, 21 and Sniper (my favourite). In that game, you would have to creep and hide like mice around the trees and not get spotted by the tribe leader who was playing. But it wasn’t just fun and games at Bushcraft……… As part of our Bushcraft experience we also did “Survival Training”. This included; a simulated plane crash (who thought lifting Mr Prideaux and Mr Matthams would be so hard!?), cutting tools, rabbit butchery, shelter building, searching for the mysterious drop bears and jumping into a freezing, spine tingling, teeth shattering, knee nobbling cold lake! You were literally gasping for air! We also did THE BRENTWOOD SCHOOL BUSHCRAFT CHALLENGE 2017!!! In our tribes we had to build a shelter, do first aid, make a fire and normally eat a fish eye but this year it was rotten! As I said we before we won (smug face). There was also a very funny Tribe’s got Talent, which was funny and ended up with an angry Mr Prideaux! In conclusion, Bushcraft was a fun and memorable experience that I will remember forever! Thank you to Sam (a “doughnut”) and everyone at The Bushcraft Company! By Adnan Yaqub On Monday 22nd May, Year 6 went to Bushcraft in Oxfordshire. It was a very long coach journey. It was 3 hours long and we were singing songs all the way. It was a very funny and lovely coach journey and once we got there we had to get our bags off and it was a 20 minute walk back to camp. Then we played some riddles and got to know whose tents we were in - I was with all my friends in tent 1. Then we got all our sleeping stuff out and went and built a shelter and we could sleep in it for the night. I didn’t sleep in it for the first two nights but I slept in it for the last two nights. I thought it was warmer and easier to get to sleep in, and one night my friend had a nightmare and he woke everybody up. It was about two o’clock in the morning and it wasn’t much fun but the next night I had the best night’s sleep I had at Bushcraft. I skinned a rabbit which was not the best when I didn’t have any gloves on. I had to do it bare-handed and I had loads of blood over my hands which absolutely stank and it didn’t really come off so I stank for the rest of the week. The weather was absolutely amazing. I wore shorts the whole time. I think it was one of the best camping trips I have been on which was brilliant. One of the days we jumped into a lake which was freezing cold at first. When you swam around it got quite warm but once you got out you were warmer. There was this rope that you held onto and someone pulled you out which was a lot of fun. Then, because it was so hot, we could sunbathe. By Charlie Thomas On Monday 22nd May the whole of Year 6 travelled to Oxfordshire for 5 days of Bushcraft. As soon as we arrived we took a long hike to our camp site over the fields. We saw our tent which I shared with Emily P, Emily H, Elizabeth E, Iffe, Elizabeth S, Jemima, Carissa & Grace S. The tent was full of spiders but it wasn’t so bad. We were put into different tribes like the Popadoms, Dawn of the Lions, Rainbow Falcons, Bras and the Bantablobs which was my tribe. The first activity we did was to build a shelter with anything we could find in the woods. I mainly helped Calum Anderson build the wall out of really thick sticks and we had the option to sleep in our shelters.