Over the past couple of weeks, 7th graders have been attending their first field trip of the year, Mountain Workshop. Mountain Workshop is a field trip that challenges students’ social skills, including teamwork and emotional learning. The fun trip offered three segments, and each took a different angle of how teamwork really does make the dreamwork. One of the segments, my personal favorite, was the build a boat challenge. But I’ll refer to it as, “Whatever Floats Your Boat.” In this segment students were divided into groups and given wooden planks, rope and tubes. With the given materials students had to work together to create a boat that could make it about 15 yards out into the Long Island Sound and back. Some groups had more trouble than others, but we were all sure to have the same amount of fun.

Once cleaned up from that segment, (we got really wet.) it was time to go to field games. Again, students were divided up into random groups and were challenged to a variety of different mini games. These included fun creative games that once again, challenged student’s teamwork skills. While the mini games were fun, about halfway through this segment people were getting a little bit hungry for lunch.

After we all ate lunch, it was time for the third and final segment. After a brief safety discussion, we were once again, (this seems to be a theme here) broken up into three groups, and we all headed out onto canoes. Working together, we sang songs, told jokes, and put all that we had into rowing together.

Although before it began there was a little bit of hesitance, there was a positive take away from this field trip throughout the grade. Jake Sini of the Blue team says, “I did not expect to have as much fun as I did.” Sean Brophy, another student at MMS, on gold team, had this to say about the field trip. “My favorite segment was the raft part, but I got totally soaked.” No matter how wet we got, I think everybody had a positive takeaway from this fun trip.