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GRIT

Great Roughing It Team Challenge

GRIT, Teamwork & Fun - How Campers Build Life Skills at Camp

At Roughing It, we are all about creating fun outdoor experiences that help campers grow and develop life skills. Our program that focuses on this is our GRIT – Great Roughing It Team Challenge program! The goal of this program is to help our campers grow through new experiences and new challenges while encouraging them to step out of their comfort zone. Campers develop their teamwork, communication, and problem solving by working through various challenges as a group.

 

 

     The GRIT program was strongly inspired by Google’s Project Aristotle, which details the importance of working effectively in a team setting as an essential job skill for the 21st century. The project outlines 5 Factors for a Successful Team which we incorporate into our GRIT program for our campers. 

How campers of all ages build life skills through GRIT challenges

     At Roughing It, our GRIT challenges encourage the campers to work as a group to solve challenges on their own. The counselors are there to supervise and facilitate the challenge to help the campers work together to come up with a group strategy to complete the challenge. The campers use their communication, collaboration, and problem solving skills to come up with a plan for completing the challenge. Our process for GRIT challenges is to have groups of campers meet and huddle up, make a plan for the challenge, tackle the challenge together, then debrief afterward on what they learned as a group. Based on new ideas or plans that came from the debrief, they can try the challenge again from a different approach or perhaps try to beat their last time! The mission of GRIT through this process is to help our campers develop life skills needed in the 21st Century: Communication, Collaboration, Critical Thinking (Problem Solving), and Creativity!

Team building skills are more important than ever for children today.  Over half of the jobs our campers will do as adults will be working in teams. Teamwork has always been a key part of the Roughing It Camp experience.  We designed our camp in 1972 as a group experience so campers could learn to work, play, and live together in the outdoors. 

Project Aristotle found 5 Factors for a successful Team.  We used these 5 factors in GRIT Challenge:

  1. Psychology Safety:  Campers  belong to a group where, in 3 or 7 weeks, they’ve  developed great relationships .
  2. Dependability: Campers over time had created a supportive community
  3. Structure & Clarity: Every camper had a certain role, and the counselor was there to moderate.
  4. Meaning: How they worked together was  important to each group because the campers chose their ‘challenges” themselves.
  5. Impact: Campers chose their own group challenges and had fun & took pride in achieving their results.

We are proud of all our campers and staff as they have completed amazing challenges over the past few summers where GRIT has been a part of Roughing It. These team building experiences from GRIT increased the real – world skills and life lessons our campers need  to lead happy and productive lives now and in their future! 

Here are some examples of GRIT activities at camp:

Waterfront: Canoe Race Challenge

Campers work in their boat groups using teamwork and collaboration in a canoe race challenge!

The Leaky Pipe Challenge

Campers use creative problem solving and teamwork to strategically plug the holes in this pipe to avoid it leaking any water!

(Great on a hot summer’s day!)

The Pipeline Challenge

Campers develop teamwork, collaboration and communication by building a pipeline bridge across a grass field getting a ball from one side to the other.