My classes forest trip to Teijo's National Park

My class was on an annual trip to Teijo's National Park. There were other 8th graders from other schools too. Our school decides what class gets to go every year and this year it was my class's turn(my class is 8A by the way). We went there by bus and first we went to a forest area where part of the tasks were and then later on we went to this other place where was some more tasks, we ate snacks and had some freetime. We had many tasks to do there and we had guides taking us to every task or station or whatever you want to call it. I will show some pictures of the tasks in the forest area next.

This was one of the tasks where we had to craft a whistle from a willows branch. Some of my friends wanted to pose for the picture so... there they are in the backround.

 In this picture in the middle is our guide explaining to us our next task where we had to locate ourselves on the map that she had given us. After we had located our location we started to do some different tasks like measuring trees, counting all the pines and other cool stuff.

Oh yeah and here is my friend Tino posing with a map.

Here we have our guide talking to us about hunting and species idenfication. Our task on that stop was to identify some animals. It was loads of fun! We were put to groups and then we had to identify or just guess the species.

We had one more task there but I sadly didn't remember to take a picture for it but I can tell you what we did there. We had a guide talking to us about forest industry and what forest machinery does and what stuff can be made of wood and where they are shipping it. It was very fascinating but there were many mosquitoes bothering us and it was very hot.

After the tasks in the forest we went to the other place (I don't remember what it's called) and we had more tasks to do. The first task was to nail as many nails to a piece of wood as we could. The trick was that the classes were in a line and everyone could hit just one time and the nail was HUGE. After the task we had some sausage, bread and juice as a snack. And as we had some freetime me and my friends went for a dip into the sea that was next to us.

Here are my friends and I in the water before we went swimming. I'm the one in the middle with a blue shirt trying to figure out how to use a juice box.


After we had eaten and swam we went back to our bus and next to the parking lot was the tasks that we had come to do. If I remember correctly the second task was to make some toy "cows" of pine cones and sticks in a short period of time. My groups gameplan was that first the boys go and collect much pine cones and sticks and the girls did them. And when we had enough cones and sticks the boys did more "cows" with the girls. Our group got tied with an other class with 28 "cows" made.

The third and final task was tug of war... It was epic. Our team was great because most of our class is pretty sporty and strong so we chose the strongest of boys and girls (of course including me) and easily beat the first battle. The second battle was the finale and that time we could get a teacher or an assistant to tug with us. We chose our assistant because he is a young and strong man and maybe because he was just stronger than our teacher... The other battle was brutal. I felt the first pull down in my spine. I was among the firsts in the line pulling the rope. After some loud yelling and pulling we won the finale.

Here we are celebrating our victory with the other schools students behind us. You can see me celebrating with my buddies on the left.

We won the competition between the schools there and we got a trophy and some popsicles as a reward. We had loads of fun there and we sang some victory songs on the bus back home.

As an opinion of the whole trip I thought it was great and very well organized. The guides were very good in their subjects and helpful when needed. The activities were very entertaining and were making a good competetive spirit between the classes.