The Boarders Take Part in Taskmaster

Taskmaster fever struck the boarding community this weekend.

Following letter writing and a thought provoking chapel service from Miss Milne, which encouraged us all to ‘not judge a book by it’s cover’, all of the boarders headed over to Fitzjames to discover the delights of Taskmaster. Some children were already familiar with the format of the comedy TV series Taskmaster hosted by Greg Davis and Alex Horne, however, for most it was a new concept. After finding out their teams, the children then worked together to rotate round a series of fourteen tasks.

Firstly, all the children embarked on a communal challenge where everyone was invited to draw a self portrait on a plate, but whilst the plate was on their head. Lots of puzzled faces and strange sound effects followed as everyone tackled the first challenge. Quickly, the children got into the spirit of the day as they dipped into their creative, artistic, engineering, comedic and dramatic talents, trying hard to work together and develop their leadership and teamwork skills to enable success. The tasks ranged from; ‘perform a dramatic interpretation of a nursery rhyme’, 'draw 100 dots on a piece of paper in the quickest time possible, before then creating a dot to dot picture’, to ‘develop a new cool handshake’, and ‘hit the target in the most impressive way’. Others included ‘create art out of a roll of toilet paper’ and ‘build the tallest free standing tower out of balloons, before bursting them in the quickest time possible.’

A scrumptious roast beef dinner was welcomed by all to give us time to collect our thoughts before moving onto the ‘Live Challenge’ tasks, the most popular of which was to ‘read the Taskmaster’s mind’ – laminator or horse -  this is trickier than it sounds! Everyone had a good giggle watching back films and photographs from the morning’s escapades and watching in fascination to see how each other had tackled each task so differently. Harriet D’s team were crowned eventual Taskmaster Champions.

The rest of the afternoon was then spent enjoying the facilities, with activities ranging from baking chocolate chip muffins, the ever popular free swim, sports, mindfulness colouring and generally being out and about and relaxing. We all then enjoyed a film; Miss Milne’s Christmas film choice seemed the most popular of the two available, despite there being almost two full weeks of November left! After another hearty home-cooked dinner, everyone trundled back into the boarding houses for a much deserved relaxed evening and early night to bed!

Miss Rudd

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