This week’s organisers were Kyle, Berit, Phil, Danny and I. We planned to do something different to everyone else that had not been covered in previous Monday sessions. During the planning not many ideas where given by some of the group with one member being late to our ‘meeting’ and not providing much input. I suggested we do a bushcraft style day with shelter building and games and asked if anyone else had any ideas. Kyle also contributed by suggesting we do a camouflage activity of some sort, and berit had ideas about filler games. When planning I feel that not all members contributed as they just agreed with everything that was said not offering any suggestions or opinion on how to organise the day. I feel they were not engaged nor had any interest in how the day would run or if it would be successful or not. Therefore during this stage I feel we did not have a strong cohesion and not everyone worked well together as a group.

On the day there were only 9 Norwegian students that attended with all the others not giving any notice they would not be present. This is very frustrating and makes it hard to plan for days like this as we had to change around all the groups and we could have planned for other activities which are easier with smaller numbers compared to the 40+ people we would have if everyone attended. If we had known so few people would be attending we would for sure have done different activities such as a camp fire cooking competition, which we had decided would be too expensive for us as the organising group if we needed to buy for a large group.

I think the day went quite well and we played a few extra games that we hadn’t planned as the activities went quicker than we expected the camouflage one especially. Most people contributed to the introduction of activities and explanations but some keep a back seat while others took the lead. In some cases I felt we needed to take more of an authoritarian approach when introducing the activities and saying ‘we are starting now’ rather than just waiting for people to quiet down and pay attention in their own time.

We had 2 main activities Shelter building and camouflaging. For the shelter build the teams had 5 minutes to plan and then 30minutes to build their shelter and make a short speech or sales pitch to present their shelter to the rest of the group. The only rule was the shelter had to be big enough to fit the whole group inside. I think this activity went well and from what I saw everyone got involved with the building or collecting of materials. It was interesting to see how each group interpreted this task and how they used whatever materials they had available. Each group was asked to bring a tarp and some sort of rope as well as any knives/axes they would use for building. Some groups solely used these materials where as others used natural materials for walls and benches as well.

The second activity involved each team camouflaging one team member and hiding them within a given area. We were not sure how well this activity would work or if people would be motivate to do it but everyone was involved and seemed to enjoy it. The winner of this task would be the group whose camouflaged person was last to be found. This ended with everyone searching for the final person who was hidden up a tree. This was a very simple, quick and effective camouflage technique, everyone else had been hidden on the forest floor.

I think that all in all the day was good but we could have been more prepared by having extra games to hand that we could fall back on. I think people were motivated with the 2 main activities because it was something different to what had been done before and therefore new and more enjoyable.