Summer Camps!!

So, this week was the start of English summer camps at my school. I had the grade 3's and the grade 4's this week, plus a parent's class. I've had the lessons planned out for weeks, so it was nice to finally use them. Each day I taught the students a different topic, animals in the wild, my family, etc. At the beginning of each lesson we played a game in order to get the students motivated to want to be at camp and to show them that learning English can be fun. Some of the games we played were pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, musical chairs, which was a huge hit, scrabble, pictionary, etc. Since, I'm not really that good at drawing I had a computer print-off of Eyore, minus his tail, that I used for the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game and the students were the ones who got to draw for pictionary. Depending on the topic being taught the students would do arts & crats, worksheets, dialogue, etc.

This is Eyore for the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game. Much better than any donkey I could draw. This is Jason and Tae Ho (Harry) coloring. Tae Ho is the grade 3 student who wrote the incredible English speech contest paper on Poverty. He is such an amazing student.

This is Jenny a grade 3 student showing off the picture of her dad. I had the students draw me one member of their family. She drew a way better picture than I did.

This is Kristy and Julia, yes another Korean with Julia as their English name. I'm getting more popular as the days go by. They are two of the five grade 4 students that actually showed up to the camp.

Each class is 50 minutes long, which is 10 minutes longer than regular school classes. I had 11 grade 3 students show up, so everyone who was registered and I had 5 grade 4's at the beginning of the week and only 4 grade 4's by the middle of the week. The grade 3's are so much fun to teach, so I really enjoyed my lessons with them, plus there were more of them, so it made games more fun. The grade 4's were also easy to teach, but with so few of them, playing games were harder and weren't as time consuming. The parent's classes are the hardest for me to teach because their levels of English are all so different. Plus, most of them are really shy and don't want to speak in front of the class, so I really have to push them to not be so nervous and realize that everyone there is trying to better their English. The parents class on Friday was my favorite because we spent the first 15 minutes playing a game called, two truths and one lie, then I taught them Minimal Pairs, which was so much fun because I got to introduce them to Tongue Twisters. They thought the tongue twisters were fun and it got them excited during the lesson.

I had a co-teacher at my disposable for each class, but to be honest, them being there was completely unneccessary. I had the classes under control and the co-teachers basically just sat around at the back of the class or would take off for a short period of time and then come back. I'm pretty sure the only reason they were even told to be there was if there was an issue that arose or because of the language barrier.

The last day of camp I just let the students play games. All week I rewarded the students with stickers for answering questions correctly, perfect attendance, etc. The last day I counted how many stickers they collected and they got to choose some prizes as a reward for their hard work all week. I had pencils, pins, candy, stickers, etc. The kids were really happy to recieve the prizes and looked forward to it all week.

I had the grade 4's play pictionary one class. Notice the difference in the girls drawings compared to the boys drawings, which just look like scribbles.

Here are some of the grade 3 students playing musical chairs. This game is such a great idea at a summer camp. It's time consuming and the kids love that they get to move around and listen to cheesy Korean pop songs :)

The camps this week are only four days because there is a Korean National Holiday on Friday. I believe it is Independence Day, so it was a short week and now I have a three day weekend to look forward to before next weeks camps with the grade 5 and 6's start.