Saturday, August 18, 2012

English Summer Camp

Many people don't understand the English summer camp thing as they picture kids going on an actual camp. This is not the case. Every winter and summer vacation the kids come back to school for what they call 'English camp', depending on your school depends on how long it is. Mine was 2 days for 3rd and 4th grade and 2 days for 5th and 6th grade.
This does not seem long but just keep in mind that is is 4 hours of English each day and you have to keep kids that are supposed to be on holiday entertained when they do not want to be in school. Needless to say it is tiring! And SO much work! You have to come up with like themes, or topics, before the camp and make all the materials like worksheets and powerpoints and print it all out. You also have to think of lots of games because it is supposed to be fun while being educational and there should be some kind of cooking/food making thing involved.
My co-teacher (hyun-joo) and I decided to make the theme around the world so they did countries and flags and continents and things like that so they made flags and mini passports and watched little video clips about it all. We also did holidays around the world and currency. For holiday they could make 4th of July posters where they used paint to blow on the page and make it look like fireworks and I also made African masks with my little ones. For the food making we did Dr Seuss's Green eggs and ham so we read them the story and watched the animated clip and then they did some worksheets, made a mini book and then in the last lesson they made green eggs and ha sandwiches. However because this is Korea and they let you know everything at the last minute our head teacher only told us like two days before that we had to go and buy ALL the materials ourselves. This is for like 60 students and there were so many materials we needed, so we were not impressed! Also you can't get green food colouring unless you order it online and we didn't have time so we had to buy yellow and they ended up making yellow eggs and ham. They enjoyed it still though!
Those were probably the most tiring and hot four days of my life and the fact that it is at the end of semester during vacation does not make it easier!
It was more fun than normal classes though because they could have more fun but the kids went crazy and keeping them quiet was quite a task.
After camp all the kids are on holiday but unlike school holidays at home the teachers still have to come to school. So besides for when I am in taiwan I have to be at school, doing who knows what for the whole day!
It literally takes a whole day to plan like 3 weeks lessons so once I had done that I pretty much planned taiwan and sat on facebook for most of the time before we left.
We got back from Taiwan yesterday though so now I am stuck deskwarming till next thursday, a whole week!!
This might just be the one aspect of out contract that I find to be completely useless and such a waste of time but it has to be done. In a lot of cases the schools know it is really stupid so they send the teachers home at like 10 or just tell them not to come in but luckily for me, my school does not see it that way. It seems to be an Elementary School thing though so I guess I just have to suck it up. I am still getting paid for those days so i guess I should not be complaining!

Here are a few photo's of my adorable kids that I love most of the time but want to strangle at others ;)


The little boy might be the naughtiest little thing you have ever come across!!

Making 4th of July posters

African Masks!


Sandwiches


The girls are always the cutest!

Making flags



Making windmills (learning about Holland)



South Africa!



I love his kid, she loves m and her English is amazing!

No comments:

Post a Comment