Summer Camp PinishE

Wow, summer has gone by fast. As you know we went to China for 1 week, taught summer camp for 3 weeks and got lasek and recovered for a week. For this blog post I am going to talk about summer camp and next post I will talk about our Lasek eye surgery.

Ok, summer camp. The schedule was one group of students come to school from 9am to 12pm and the next group of students came to school 1:30 to 5:30. There are six classes of students and they rotate through each native teacher, which means I had other native English speaking people at my school. It was a nice treat to be able have a regular conversation with someone everyday. I volunteered to teach Drama in the morning and then I taught the text book to the afternoon kids.

Drama was a lot of work and responsibility, but still a lot of fun. I went into it thinking I had to teach each class of students a play and after 3 weeks they would perform in front of all of their family and friends. After one week I realized the difficulty of teaching each class a different play, so I had some classes perform the same play. The class that was the least motivated (class 5) just learned songs. These kids were out to get me, but I won and stuck to songs instead of torturing them with memorizing lines of English they did not understand. BUT, my most proud teaching moment was when the lowest class (class 6) decided to take on the task of memorizing a play. The did “Jack and the Beanstalk.” They worked so hard and actually had fun. They made teaching Drama an easy choice for me.

Afternoon classes I taught 3 lessons out of the book and 3 lessons of my own. The book was way over their head and I had to alter the lessons anyway. It seems similar to the states. I guess it’s true, no matter where you are it is difficult to choose a textbook program that fits all teachers/students needs. But, through experience I have learned just pull from it what you need and go from there (but stick to the standards haha). I felt my own creation of lessons were more effective because I stuck to one English concept and ventured from there. I also taught a lot of games. Everyday the kids would walk in and say, “teacher game?” I caved and realized it was English CAMP and was meant to be fun. Can you believe a parent actually called and complained that their child was not completing their text book? So, the last day of school the kids had to just finish pages out of their workbook. One parent and every camp in the area had to finish workbook pages. Come on parents, you need to trust us teachers. UHG! I guess that’s another similarity to the states. There will always be parents who think they know better then the teacher:)

All in all, Summer Camp was a good experience. The kids were cute and I met some new English teachers. We had a sports day, a market day and a performance day. The performances were not perfect, but pretty good for 3 weeks of work.