Kingswood: A weekend away
The weekend of October 3rd to 5th was a special one for many of the children in Year 6 (and their parents).
This was the weekend when lots of the children and five teachers went to Kingswood in Norfolk.
At Kingswood, a holiday centre for children, there are lots of different activities. There is space for children
from lots of schools and they are timetabled to do different activities at different times. When we went to
Kingswood we had to make our beds and put all our clothes into a special basket. We shared bedrooms with
our friends. Some rooms had one bunk bed and others had four or five bunks. The girls' rooms were upstairs
and the boys' were downstairs. We got up at about 6.00 o'clock in the morning and bedtime was at about
9.00 o'clock.
Activities at Kingswood
Swimming
On the first night at Kingswood we went swimming in the indoor pool. We went at 8.00pm, after our
evening meal, for about an hour.
The pool was not too deep so it was good for playing in as well as for swimming. It was surrounded by
green astroturf and there were changing rooms nearby. In the swimming pool you were allowed to play with
balls, floats and rubber bricks or you could just swim around. Most people did both.
Climbing
There were three sections of climbing wall at Kingswood in a special room next to the swimming pool.
Before we started climbing we had to put on safety equipment which included a helmet and a harness. After
that we had to do the Homer Simpson test. To do this we had to hit the front of the helmet with the palm of
your hand and say "Doh!". If the helmet moved then you had to tighten it.
Then everyone had to be checked by an instructor one by one before they went down the stairs to the
climbing wall. There were three different walls and one was really hard because it had an overhanging
section. A lot of people got to the top of the easy walls though.
Archery
Archery at Kingswood was really fun. At the end of the arrow there were 3 feathers: the red one was
called Fred and the two green ones were called Wilma and Barney! You had to hold the bow in an upwards
fashion with "Fred" pointing at the roof. If you missed the board everybody shouted "WORM KILLER!"
very loudly. The number of arrows that hit the grass - it was a massacre!
Buggies
First we all watched a demonstration of how to put on the seat belt and to put on the helmet. Then the
instructor showed us how to drive it. We all took it in turns to have a go. We were meant to go round twice
but some people went round three times because they were going too fast to stop!
Quite a few people banged into the tyres and some people were bouncing up and down because the track
was so bumpy.
Everyone enjoyed it, especially all the teachers!
Computers
At Kingswood we spent a lot of time working on the computers. The thing we did first was to watch clips of
little movies and then we took pictures of each other which came up on the screen of the computer. In the
second lesson we put the photo of ourselves on the computer and wrote about ourselves. In another lesson
we made a chart of things we found on the beach and also drew pictures of what we saw. When we had
finished on the computer, all the things we did were put in a booklet which was printed out for us to keep.
Kingswood Survey
This is a survey of activities that people enjoyed most at Kingswood.
We asked 33 people what they most liked out of: climbing, swimming, computers, buggies and archery. The
graph below shows people's preferences:
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