Union World and a bit of Spongebob

Winter camp is finally finished....for my school at least. Native teachers usually have to teach a one to two week camp course during both the summer and winter vacations. I got off lucky in the summer. I only had to have class for three days and only for an hour and a half. No prep needed, it was games the whole day. :D Work was a breeze. This time, I spent days and days wracking my brain and the internet and whatever other sites I could find looking for activities for the students. I have to say though that the past few stressful weeks truly paid off. I couldn't have asked for a better winter camp experience. My 24 students, all girls and 3 boys, did everything I asked and more. Their camp focused on speaking and writing skills so I tried to incorporate a number of speaking and writing activities. The one thing I enjoyed the most though was their journal writing. At the end of each day, they wrote an entry about their camp day, and I would take it home, read it, and revise it. Some of their entries were just amazing and so sweet. They put so much time into writing them. They even stayed way past quitting time just to finish writing in their journals. Lee would say "They're well keen!" :P Most of them were so absorbed in their journal entries that my coteacher and I had to finally drag them out of the classroom after 4:40.

Some pictures of my students working on their projects

The girls were working on their script for their news broadcast.

3rd attempt at making a paper microphone

Looking up nature sounds to use for their weather segment

Wanted a 'Handsome' shot in front of the 2nd grade story projects. "Teacher, I need girlfriend!" :P

My girls were so sad to leave today. One girl even asked if the school could have winter camp every day for the whole vacation period. O_O Just thinking about the prepwork makes me dizzy. :/

Some of the most memorable things about my camp were their country posters and today's acting lesson. For their country lesson, I had each group of girls create their own countries i.e. political leaders, laws, climate, etc.

Union world was my favorite. The girls in this group got a bit confused at one point and thought that union meant unicorn, so they put a unicorn on their country's flag. Ha ha :) They were so cute! They spent ages drawing and coloring in bits and pieces. They were so sad when they lost the class vote for best country. Of all the groups, these girls were the best. I felt sooo bad that they had not only lost the country vote, but that they had ended up losing all 4 games I played the rest of the day. The one sentence that kept popping up in each of their journals that day was "Today, I'm so irritating, every game we lose so feeling bad. OTL." Ha. Turns out the next day, they won all the major games and cleaned out the prize bin. :) It's funny how things just happen to turn around sometimes.

Hye Yeon Country was another interesting country. They had the standard same laws as everyone else: No Killing, No stealing, No Homework, School for only four hours, and then there was one that stuck out...Every baby born must be beautiful or handsome. Uh...

In the end, they all did such a good job. The teachers who helped out with the winter camp were so impressed at the end products of each activity.

I was going to put up pictures of the country posters, but I accidentally formatted the memory card. I'll retake the pictures and post them up later.

The last day was definitely one of the funniest days. I showed the students two spongebob episodes. Then I gave them bits of the script to act out. I didn't know if it would go over so well mainly due to the fact that Korean kids absolutely hate to get up in front of class, but they were great. They got really into their roles as Spongebob characters. I'm going to try to put the videos here so you can see a few. I still can't get over one of the girls yelling "Pickles! Pickles! I forgot the Pickles!" We all had such a great laugh at the short skits. You can watch a video of the best group on Lee's youtube account.

The girls finished the camp today with a long long journal entry. Class was supposed to end at 4:10 today and none of them left til almost 5. I read the last entries of most of the students, and I got a bit teary. Most of them had written how much they had loved English camp and me. It was so heartwarming and an experience that I know I will keep for a long time even after I leave Korea.