Winter Camp

Shortly after Christmas, Korean schools have winter vacation. This usually lasts about 4 weeks and sometime during that time, English teachers are expected to have an English Camp. The camp at my school lasted 2 weeks from January 5th to January 16th. Students were divided into 3 groups: beginner, intermediate and advanced. My two co-teacher took the other two groups, and I was given the advanced students. There were five, 40 minute classes each day and I had 7 students in my class.

I loved the small size because it gave me a more personal, one-on-one teaching atmosphere with the students. We were able to play all sorts of games and do more fun, advanced activities that I hadn't been able to do during the school year because of the plethora of levels in my classroom.

At the end of class one day, we had some extra time, so I taught them how to play the card game "Spoons." However, I didn't have any spoons, so I let them play with chopsticks instead.

In our world geography and countries themed day, I started off seeing how many countries they could name off the top of their head. I was absolutely AMAZED with the results. They were able to come up with 70 countries, with only a few hints here and there from me. It was at this point that I truly understood I had a talented group of kids.

Another day, for the craft and activity portion of class, I divided them into teams and had them race to see who could build the tallest tower or structure using only marshmallows and raw spaghetti noodles.

For our food and restaurant day, I taught them how to read and write recipes in English and then had them follow one in order to put together their very own crepe.

At one portion of the food and restaurant class, they had to draw a menu to use in a skit. This was one of the groups'. I thought it was funny how expensive they made the beer.

One of the days' theme was superheroes! After having them name as many superheroes as they could think of and describing their powers, the students got to write about and design their own superhero. At the last part of the day, I had them write a brief comic about their superhero. These are some examples I got.

There were 2 days of camp that I worked together with the other two teachers to bring all 3 classes together for a bigger activity. The first of which was a "Minute-to-Win-It" Game day! Using nothing but boxes, ping pong balls, dice, balloons, chopsticks, straws, cups, coins, rubber bands, marbles and sting, we came up with an endless amount of games they could play and split the classes into 3 even teams.

In one game, students had to hold a box on their head while their teammates tried to throw the ping pong balls into it.

In another, a team of 2 had to use two pieces of string to pick up a series of chopsticks and carry them across the room.

In another, favorite game, one students got a tissue box full of ping pong balls taped to their back. Then they had to jump around to try and get the balls out of the box.

The other group class day, we divided students into 7 teams (1 advanced student for each team) and played a sort of question game. There would be a questions or sentence with a missing word on the board and each team would answer on their whiteboard.

As a warm up question to make sure all the students knew what they were doing, my co-teacher asked, "Where is Nicole Teacher from?" It was an easy question that everyone should have know the answer to, but one group, to my surprise, wrote "Canada". I playfully scolded my 5th grade student that was on the team. I couldn't believe he had been in my class for 5 months now and actually thought I was from Canada.

Two other days of the week, we took our classes on educational field trips that had been set up and run by the MOE (Metropolis Office of Education). The first week we went to the Ulsan History Museum, and the second week, we went to the Ulsan Grand Park Museum. At both locations, I was actually able to learn about the history and current products of the city of Ulsan. they were fun and informative trips.