Skills Work - At Camp!

Sault College, Sault Ste. Marie

My second-last camp was at Sault College in Sault Ste. Marie.  (I found out that "Sault" is pronounced “soo.”  Isn’t that weird?)  Anyway, Sault Ste. Marie was kinda far from everywhere else I’ve been, but there’s a lot going on in the town during the summer.  And the campus is pretty cool because they have so many different programs.  It was worth the trip!

On our first afternoon, a lady named Lisa came to our camp to talk about safety.  I already knew some stuff, because of hearing Eric’s presentation a couple of weeks ago.  But this was super cool.  Lisa split us into teams and had us go through part of the college to find safety stuff – good and bad.  My team found a tonne of stuff!  We’re so observant.

In our electrical workshop, we made a keychain flashlight that was also a strobe light.  Part of it involved soldering wires to a small electrical board, which is really hard!  Our workshop leader, Ken, was pretty patient with me though, and I got the hang of it in the end though.  It was fun, and now I have a flashlight keychain to show off!  Maybe going back to school won’t be so bad with all this cool stuff I have to talk about!

Electrical was in the morning, and then in the afternoon we did a culinary workshop.  We made cinnamon rolls from scratch.  Well, Jason, our workshop leader, had prepared dough ahead of time so that we wouldn’t have to wait for the dough to rise.  But he showed us how to make it, and I have the recipe so I can make it at home from scratch when I have lots of time.  I love this cooking stuff, it’s really fun!  And the best part is sampling everything you make – yum!

I got to do another hairstyling workshop this week.  Our workshop leader, Paula, taught me how to make a braid.  I tried braiding a mannequin’s hair, and that’s really hard too!  How do girls do it so easily??  Maybe it’s just a practice thing.  I even let one of the girls paint my fingernails.  But black nail polish only…I at least wanted to look like a rock star!

We did a lot of tours this week too.  We went through the airplane hangar at the college, which was neato.  They have a flight training program, and we got to sit in a lot of the planes.  One of the aircraft mechanics was there to answer questions about being an aircraft mechanic.  She told us that there are more women in aircraft maintenance than other types of motive power trades.  Apparently, a lot of women entered the trade during World War II, and that paved the way for more women after them.  I think my mom told me once that her grandmother was an aircraft mechanic during the war.  I’m going to ask her about that.

Continuing with our plane theme, we also visted the Bushplane Museum, and that was really fun.  I learned stuff, like how planes stay up and how the wings work, but I also tried out the simulator games and stuff.  It was awesome!  We also toured the Brookfield Wind Farm, which I thought was cool too.  Wind power is so amazing!  The farm had 126 windmills, and we actually got to go inside to see how they work.

I only have one more week of camp left!  Where did the summer go??