Goodbye English camp!

Another ten days have passed. The Jeollanamdo English Camp has finished. The students are gone.

Teaching elementary school students during the second camp was a different experience for me because I got a group of energetic and bubbly students. They chose English names like Button, Spaghetti and Danis.

We were homeroom five, and our name was the Funny Yellow Monkeys! I taught food and restaurant (not unlike cooking except we didn't cook anything haha), and we played a game called, Big Chef.

It is the common American game of Big Booty, but I changed the name to chef to fit our class description and made everyone pick a food name from the vocabulary.

Everyone loved the game when we played it in class and called me Big Chef. I think this time around, I enjoyed the camp more because my students gave me energy when I was drained from teaching. Also, I got enough experience with the middle school students to know what types of games and ways of teaching worked.

I had an unforgettable experience English teaching in Gokseong! Many thanks to the Jeollanamdo Provincial Office and the Jeollanamdo Office of Education for making this trip possible and one-in-a-kind!

Now, I am with five other ASU students who also taught at the camp and touring South Korea! ^_^

My first ten-day camp

Annyong hee ga se yo! Goodbye to my wonderful homeroom students!

For ten days, I was one of the 12 native English teachers in the middle school camp in Gokseung. For ten days, I taught the Cooking lesson alongside my Korean co-teacher, Jung-eun. For ten days, I learned how to be a better teacher and impact 15-year-olds.

One would think that teaching the same three-hour lessons twice a day could get monotonous, but I found that each group of students was different. Their English level varied, so Jung-eun and I slowed down or accelerated our lessons. Flexibility was key.

We got assigned a homeroom—number four. For 20 minutes each morning and two hours in the evening, we met together and did icebreakers and journal writing as well as prepared for a skit. This was a time for our 12 students to practice their English more in a more relaxed and fun environment. They each picked an English name to be called for the rest of the camp.

Some of the names were so creative and funny like Blanker, Bieber and Lone haha My homeroom was seriously the best—a group of very polite and kind students. They were always ready to participate and volunteer, and they were patient in learning English (and whenever Jung-eun had to translate something).

In the course of ten days, I taught all 144 middle school students participating in the camp starting with our homeroom. We made ham and cheese sandwiches, pancakes and chocolate chip cookies while teaching the kids vocabulary. We also played hangman, charades and pictionary to reiterate the newly-learned words.

After each class time, the students rotated and went to another lesson (we called them booths) like math, science, shopping and around the world to a total of 12 subjects. But it wasn’t all just teaching; we also had a day for mini-olympics, quiz shows, a talent show and skit time.

The second-to last day, all homerooms performed a skit that the students created, and my homeroom’s was a celebrity show. They had three judges: Paris Hilton, Lady Gaga and Tyra Banks (a boy dressed as a girl) haha The host was Oprah Winfrey and the models were all celebrities as well including Neo from The Matrix and Tom Cruise.

It was very entertaining to see the students do the skits in English because they were so imaginative! Their level of English definitely rose by the end of ten days.

I am so proud of Homeroom Number Four and all the students, native English teachers and Korean co-teachers that participated in the middle school camp. It was a unique and wonderful experience for me as a teacher, and I couldn’t have done it without them and all the support and help from the staff.

A BIG THANK YOU to the Province of Jeollanam-do, principal of the camp, cooks, cleaning ladies and staff that help put this program together! Now, I will stay in a homestay for a three-day vacation before starting the next camp for elementary children…