Sunday, 5th July
What a lovely first evening! Has been truly special. So many smiling and happy faces; new and familiar and everyone got involved with our famous L&E Wide Games! It’s going to be a great week! (More photos to follow tomorrow)
Monday, 6th July
Our first morning kicked off with great energy, supplied with popping tunes from our camp leaders to wake up the house!
All in good spirits (and with full tummies!) after breakfast, we headed to our morning energisers! We played capture the flag and WOW the kids are quick! Afterwards, we separated into our groups for morning activities: Young Global Leaders, Creative and Sport!
Our Young Global Leaders group spent time getting to know each other and learning the names of their peers before making paper aeroplanes to learn more about their new friends! In Creative, the campers made bingo cards and also some made a camp bucket list! In Sport, the team played a tantalising game of tennis, followed by football with their camp leaders as teammates!
After lunch, the campers enjoyed their afternoon activities; ranging from a flower collecting adventure walk to rock climbing! Then all the campers swarmed to the lake to cool off in the water – so much fun and lots of great dives!
After a wind-down and dinner, we headed to play our Annual Icebreaker Games, there was lots of drenched camp leaders and laughing campers!
Stay tuned to hear which team gets announced as the winner tomorrow!
Tuesday, 7th July
Today started eggcellently with a beaningful breakfast of tater tots and bacon; the campers have been making the most of shawnigan’s delicious catering!
Then, our electric energisers shocked the campers into life with splat and seaweed and sharks being the fan favourites.
There was a wide variety of programmes on ranging from scavenger hunt to flag football! Our YGL and English campers began the day with a scavenger hunt around the campus looking for notable landmarks before starting on their presentations, which will be presented tomorrow…
Sport today consisted of an intense bootcamp workout in the morning, meaning everyone was feeling athletic for flag football in the afternoon. Campers also channelled their inner Monet in the creative sessions, selecting exquisite rocks to paint with acrylics. Edventure also made a dramatic return this year with some den building in the woods.
After lake time and a delectable dinner we initiated this camp with a key L&E tradition, camp fire night! With music, performances, a camp fire and most importantly – hot chocolate! This activity helped to bring everyone together and get the camp in a festive, jolly mood.
The highlight of the day for our leaders was certainly confiscating 22 pot noodles and a kettle!
Wednesday, 8th July
Paddle Boarding Day!
Thursday, 9th July
Phew, today has been a busy day indeed! After our staff spent the early morning locating the team blogger who’d gone missing yesterday, we started our day off with energizers, where we played a riveting game of fruit salad, consisting of dragonfruit, peaches, watermelon, and lychee. A sweet mix indeed!
After the YGL and English cohorts rushed off to discuss the secrets behind everlasting friendship and explore the Grow Dome, the rest of the camp split into Sport and Creative activities. The sporty ones played a bit of volleyball whilst the creatives transformed into bakers, spending their morning baking scones, which were judged by L&E’s very own amateur food critics.
After lunch, a select group of campers went rock climbing, while some of the YGL and English campers had their go at baking. Other activities of the afternoon were mini Olympics and den building!
Meanwhile, our staff were hard at work preparing for the big event of the day: Theme Night! This week, our theme was the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The night kicked off (pun intended) with an exhilarating opening ceremony, after which our 5 teams battled it out in 5 mini games. These tested their kicking, celebrating, commentating, dancing, and advertising skills, all in effort to win the L&E FIFA contest. Results will be announced tomorrow!
Friday, 10th July
This morning started off with the classic wake up ritual of blasting music on the speaker and patrolling the corridor carrying the speaker like a boom box and exclaiming ‘wake up’ at the top of our lungs – exactly what one wants to hear first thing in the morning!
This was followed by a breakfast fit for champions – as always, shoutout the excellent Shawnigan catering team! After we had supped like medieval kings, we played another medieval classic game – capturing the flags of your enemies! On the field of battle, we saw some strong performances, almost worthy of comparison to the capture of enemy flags seen at Agincourt! This was succeeded by several games (or more like duels) of splat which suitably energised us for the exciting day ahead.
The morning saw much enthusiastic participation in English, YGL, creative, and sport. I am however, mainly qualified to talk about my area of allocation in that time slot – sport. Given our relatively small overall numbers this week, my badminton group was small, and had no nets, but we improvised, and ended up playing badminton on the beach volleyball court! This worked surprisingly well for a while, but interest eventually waned and so this morphed into a 3 per side football game, which led up to lunch.
In the afternoon, all the activities apart from creative merged into a big group of 31, for some edventuring of various kinds. One subgroup did laser tag, another archery, and another my personal favourite – den building, for which we had some excellent team and individual performances. The Ewoks (yes that’s a Return of the Jedi reference) would be proud!
The day concluded on a bittersweet note, with the presentation of the prestigious L&E Oscar Awards. With everyone excelling in at least one of the categories this week, choosing winners was very difficult, but we eventually landed upon some very worthy winners, so congratulations to everyone who won an award, but just as equally to all those who also just missed out!
Awards was followed by a lovely group dance party. The dancing was of a very high standard, but with emotions running so high, the reality set in that tomorrow, many happy campers would soon be returning home – a prospect that drove everyone to heartfelt hugs, and some to tears. In this way, a Wonderful Week 1 was fittingly concluded. Thank you to all those involved, for making it such a special week!
