Year 8 Students Learn Resilience

Year 8 Students Learn Resilience Learn about a recent field trip that kicked-off an International Middle Years Curriculum learning unit on "resilience" by reading this first-hand account written by two Year 8 students. They clearly learned a lot! When a group of Year 8 students headed to a nearby corn maze to kick-off their first International Middle Years Curriculum learning unit on "resilience," they thought it would simply be a fun trip out of the classroom. What they experienced, however, turned out to be a whole lot more. Read on for an account of the learning experience from two Year 8 students.

Year 8 student Ana S. discusses her experience on the trip:

On Thursday the 4th of September we (Year 8) went to a corn maze in Connecticut for our entry point, exploring a "big idea" of resilience: “Success over time requires persistence”.

In our journey to get to the corn maze some of us had to be persistent because there were some technical issues with the bus. In the corn maze we had to be persistent and try to find answers to questions on a sheet that they gave us. We had to work as a team and collaborate to not get lost in the maze and to find the answers in the maze.

Overall it was a lot of fun!

Year 8 student Aisling T. also shares her experience on the field trip, detailing the many ways in which students (and staff!) had to learn about resilience and persistence first-hand:

On September 4th all of the Year 8 students went on a field trip to the Fort Hill Farms corn maze adventure in Thompson, Connecticut. We all left in the 3 new mini buses the school owns. Our trip had been going great until we reached the highway...

Mrs. Dolan (my science teacher) realized that the bus wouldn't go any higher than 25 mph. No matter how hard she pushed on the exhilarator the bus just wouldn't go faster. It just made strange rumbling noises. Eventually we all stopped and called the car repair shop!

The other 2 buses went ahead while we waited for a tow truck to come.  When it arrived, the repair man asked us to take the bus for a test run. Of course it worked then, but on the second try it stayed at 25 mph. Soon after that we drove up to the car repair shop and left the mini bus there. Señor Davet (MFL teacher) picked us all up in the mini bus he drove and before we knew it we were finally at the corn maze!

Everyone else had already finished the corn maze by the time we got there so we decided to have some lunch and ice cream before we went in. After lunch, the rules of the corn maze were explained: no running, throwing things, touching the corn, etc. Then we were off!

Students were given a mini worksheet so we could find certain things in the maze. We found two bridges you could cross just to get some fresh air (walking around in a closed area- the corn maze- for too long makes you feel like a baked potato!).

After an hour or so of losing people, finding people and stranding people, we had finally made it out of the corn maze! We gathered everyone together, took one last group picture and left for home.

Luckily, Mr. Natale drove another school mini bus back up so we could get back! We did have one problem though.... Miss Andrews couldn't reach the peddles and didn't know how to move the seat forward so one bus came back to help! Oh, and if your wondering, we DIDN'T have any more problems after that... Thank goodness!