MARS HILL – If you want kids to learn about teamwork and friendship, let ’em rough it for a few days in the woods.

That’s how SAD 42 officials decided to reinforce their character education program with sixth-graders, who on Monday were back for their first day of class since going on their camping trip.

According to a few of the Mars Hill sixth-graders, not only did the camp-out work – they “had a blast” doing it.

About 20 pupils and a handful of teachers and staff traveled last week to Camp Roosevelt in Eddington to participate in the SAD 42-sponsored character education camp, which offers two days of hands-on learning activities to promote the concepts of teamwork, trust, caring, achieving goals and building self-esteem.

Think “Survivor” – but replace the “take no prisoners” mentality with one of teamwork – and you’re getting close to what the sixth-graders experienced.

Campers Sasha Grass and Gabrielle Brewer, both 11, said climbing a giant boulder, taking a night hike and negotiating a “spider web” as a class helped them put everyday school life into perspective.

“At school, everyone tries to be the top dog, but there we didn’t care,” Brewer said.

The girls said they were too busy surviving in the great outdoors – the urge to keep warm beat out the urge to stay fashionable – and focusing on the teamwork-centered games to pay attention to popularity issues.

Instead of worrying about whom to befriend, the pupils were depending on each other to problem-solve their way through several activities.

For example, the girls said, they had to use teamwork to wind their way through a rope course called the spider web. They weren’t allowed to touch the ropes, placed strategically at different heights, and they had to communicate and plan carefully to complete the course. In some cases, that meant lifting someone up through the ropes or using another person as a stepping stone.

“It was hard,” Grass recalled. “We really had to trust each other.”

That, said Heidi Shaw, was exactly the point.

“It’s the mental part we were trying to get to from doing the physical activity,” Shaw, the sixth-grade teacher and camp coordinator, said Monday.

All the problem solving and sports and camping activities taught pupils to trust their classmates, build their own self-confidence and work together to achieve a common goal, Shaw said.

Now that they are all back in the classroom, Shaw hopes to “hang on” to the experience.

“I wish we had more opportunities like this because it’s more real life. It levels the playing field and shows students that everyone is the same,” she said. “I plan to relive it myself and with my students often.”

Grass and Brewer, however, said the camp-out was an experience they won’t soon forget.

“I think we came back as a team,” Brewer said, “because we got to see a different perspective of everyone.”

And the results? The class just got back on Friday, but the outlook is positive.

“We’ve started doing more together,” Grass said. “We try not to leave anybody out.”

Angela Day, a sixth-grader at Fort Street Elementary School in Mars Hill, is blindfolded and has to trust her classmates Brittney Kilcollins (from left), Rebecca Grass and Sarah Brewer (right) as she falls around the circle. The exercise was part of the COPE ropes course at Camp Roosevelt in Eddington.