When Nouth and I were first informed that we'd be teaching summer camp, they told us it would be a four week camp. We'd two two weeks with first grade and then two weeks with second grade, and that would take our entire summer vacation. We figured that wouldn't really be fun at all, so we said we could do both first and second grade at the same time and do 2 weeks and then have 2 weeks off. After a little deliberation, they agreed to this, and they also agreed to let us leave as soon as we were done teaching, as long as we made a lesson plan for every day we left before 4:30. Since Nouth lives in Pyeongnae and it takes her about 20 minutes by bus to school, she wanted to start at 9am like regular classes during the semester, instead of the proposed 8:30. They also agreed to this, and told us we'd be teaching from 9 until 12:30, and then we'd be free to go.
After the teacher workshop trip and a lazy weekend, we were back at school on Monday to start summer camp. We started at 9 and I had the first graders for the first two periods, and then we'd switch and I'd teach second for third and fourth period. there were about 12-14 first graders and 7-9 second graders.
Soon after the first class had started, the head English teacher came
around to inform us that in fact we would not be starting at 9, we'd be
starting at 830, and what I didn't understand about this is that we
were retroactively adjusting the start time for the class already in
progress as well. So at 10:10 when the 2nd graders showed up to my
class I was really confused, until Nouth explained that we were
pretending we had started at 8:30.
Once that was all settled up, we continued to just do introductions and ice-breaking stuff for the rest of the day. On Tuesday, the students began their research for posters of famous non-Koreans. The popular choices were Ronaldo and Michael Jackson. One group of second grade girls chose Linkin Park. Also on Tuesday, I assigned them to write a short diary in English as homework. Once they were finished with their posters, I gave them a sheet with all the incorrect sentences from their diaries on it, and told them to correct the sentences alone or in groups, and then when they were finished, we went over it as a class. This worked out perfectly in the first grade class, but the second graders were not interested at all. I tried making them do it on two separate days and they wouldn't. We had been told beforehand that we could do whatever we wanted in the summer camp, and my only guideline was to focus on reading and writing, so I decided to show them Totoro in the second week.
On Monday, in the first grade classes, we warmed up with a game and the students ended up liking it so much we played it for most of 2 classes and then watched about 30 minutes of Totoro at the end. I thought that I had finally come up with a good plan, until we switched grades and I tried to have the second graders do the same thing. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday had been fine in the second grade classes, but Thursday, Friday and now Monday they had shown little to no interest in the class. Their refusal to play the warm-up game started to piss me off, honestly. I told them the winning team would get a pizza, and they still wouldn't try. I told them the losing team would have to buy the pizza for the winning team, and they still didn't try. I was sick of it. Not only did they not want to do anything, I had to take away 3 cell phones (one of which the student actually answered in class when it rang), a chess set, a rubik's cube, and a book, I was not pleased.
I spread them out across the classroom, with 3 desks between each student, and I told them to take out the sheets with the diary sentences on it and I told them that this time it was a test, they couldn't work together and they'd be graded on it. I gave them about 45 minutes to work on it and then I collected the sheets from them making sure they put their name on both pages, and then I prepared to watch Totoro. One student who was not a particularly good student and had only showed up for about 3 classes to this point, during the test had done absolutely nothing. Well, to be completely fair, he had gone through both sheets and filled in every single enclosed space in all the e's, a's, o's, etc.
When it came time to watch Totoro, I gave them a list of questions to answer and I gave them a piece of paper to take notes and answer the questions on. When I got to this boy to give him the paper, he reached out to take it but after all the past few days of disinterest culminating in his absolute absence of effort on the test, I pulled the paper away from his hand at the last second. "If I give you this piece of paper, will you actually do anything?" He gave half a laugh and then realized I wasn't really joking, even though he didn't understand me. I said it again, louder and slower. I knew he didn't understand what I was saying, so I looked at the other students. One boy was sort of giggling quietly, so I figured he understood what was happening. I ordered him to translate and I picked up one of the diary sentence sheets with his doodling on it. "If I give you this piece of paper to take notes during the movie, will you actually take notes, or will I end up with this again?" I held up the filled-in-circles so all the other kids saw it, and most of them had picked up on what was going on. With the help of my translator, I got my point across and the kid finally understood what was going on, he gave a little nod and held out his hand for the paper, so I gave it to him.
I let the movie run for half an hour until the end of class, and I didn't bother checking their notes then, so I don't know if he actually did take any, and he didn't show up again for the rest of summer camp. The problem with summer camps and after school classes is that a lot of kids are signed up by their parents to take advantage of a free babysitting service, so I didn't really care that this kid who hadn't participated in anything up to this point in the three times he had shown up didn't come back for the rest of the week.
After Monday, things got a lot better. The first grade classes were fine the whole way through, but apparently the test idea was a good one for the second graders. When I gave them back their graded papers on Tuesday and they were all marked up in red and the highest score was 12.5/23, they were not happy about it and they voluntarily asked me about various sentences until we had gone through the whole two pages as a class and gone over every error and corrected them all. Combined with Totoro, the second week turned out to be really good.
The only bad spot was when I was told during the second day of Totoro that I wasn't supposed to watch animation and I wasn't supposed to sit down. (During the movie, I would move around and sit different places in the classroom) This didn't exactly please me, considering I had been told I could do whatever I want, so the next day we watched the last half hour of the movie, and I sat through it.
It actually turned out to be the best teaching tool of the summer camp, as after the movie I got the students to go through a full page of vocabulary from the film, and I explained the ones they didn't know one at a time in English as clear as I could, and then I gave them a Korean translation. After that, with vocab in hand, I gave them a full page of dense Wikipedia plot summary of the movie and got them to read the whole thing and then ask comprehension questions about the film and the story, and also more vocabulary. Then after that, I gave them a character list with reflection questions about the movie such as "who was your favorite character?" (the answer was either Totoro or the Catbus, one student said Kanta, the boy) Using that character sheet, the students then paired up and picked a character to create an original story about. They wrote the stories and then I went group to group and helped them with their grammar and spelling. On the last day we made little booklets and wrote the stories in the books with pictures, and then each group read their story to the class. So if the school comes to me to say anything about watching animation again, I can show them 9 original storybooks written in English, by the students, along with the posters in English, and tell them to put that in their pipe and smoke it. Graham said his school was really amazed the first time they saw the posters his students had made (I stole the idea from him) so I imagine my school will react the same way. Plus, he says they like to have things to show off at fairs and such to parents and people from other schools, and I think some English storybooks will be very impressive.
There was one real funny thing that happened during summer camp, but to understand it you need to understand that Koreans have an interesting fascination with head size. It goes way beyond just teasing a kid with a big head, and there are kids with really big heads, but they think it's seriously awesome to have a small head in a way that goes beyond the kind of teasing you'd see on playgrounds in America. This example illustrates pretty well what I mean. I'm sitting in class while the students write their stories, and one girl has taken her handbag and put the handles over her head so it's hanging around her neck. Right as I look up to see this, she takes the bag off her neck, and as she gets her head out of the handles she goes "YEAH!! SMALL HEAD!" in pretty much the most triumphant voice I've ever heard. One of her friends gives a half-cheer and a clap and I just start cracking up.
Summer camp ended on July 31, and I had plans with Ryley and Barney to leave Maseok at 3:00pm to go to Sokcho to start our summer vacation trip.
Once that was all settled up, we continued to just do introductions and ice-breaking stuff for the rest of the day. On Tuesday, the students began their research for posters of famous non-Koreans. The popular choices were Ronaldo and Michael Jackson. One group of second grade girls chose Linkin Park. Also on Tuesday, I assigned them to write a short diary in English as homework. Once they were finished with their posters, I gave them a sheet with all the incorrect sentences from their diaries on it, and told them to correct the sentences alone or in groups, and then when they were finished, we went over it as a class. This worked out perfectly in the first grade class, but the second graders were not interested at all. I tried making them do it on two separate days and they wouldn't. We had been told beforehand that we could do whatever we wanted in the summer camp, and my only guideline was to focus on reading and writing, so I decided to show them Totoro in the second week.
On Monday, in the first grade classes, we warmed up with a game and the students ended up liking it so much we played it for most of 2 classes and then watched about 30 minutes of Totoro at the end. I thought that I had finally come up with a good plan, until we switched grades and I tried to have the second graders do the same thing. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday had been fine in the second grade classes, but Thursday, Friday and now Monday they had shown little to no interest in the class. Their refusal to play the warm-up game started to piss me off, honestly. I told them the winning team would get a pizza, and they still wouldn't try. I told them the losing team would have to buy the pizza for the winning team, and they still didn't try. I was sick of it. Not only did they not want to do anything, I had to take away 3 cell phones (one of which the student actually answered in class when it rang), a chess set, a rubik's cube, and a book, I was not pleased.
I spread them out across the classroom, with 3 desks between each student, and I told them to take out the sheets with the diary sentences on it and I told them that this time it was a test, they couldn't work together and they'd be graded on it. I gave them about 45 minutes to work on it and then I collected the sheets from them making sure they put their name on both pages, and then I prepared to watch Totoro. One student who was not a particularly good student and had only showed up for about 3 classes to this point, during the test had done absolutely nothing. Well, to be completely fair, he had gone through both sheets and filled in every single enclosed space in all the e's, a's, o's, etc.
When it came time to watch Totoro, I gave them a list of questions to answer and I gave them a piece of paper to take notes and answer the questions on. When I got to this boy to give him the paper, he reached out to take it but after all the past few days of disinterest culminating in his absolute absence of effort on the test, I pulled the paper away from his hand at the last second. "If I give you this piece of paper, will you actually do anything?" He gave half a laugh and then realized I wasn't really joking, even though he didn't understand me. I said it again, louder and slower. I knew he didn't understand what I was saying, so I looked at the other students. One boy was sort of giggling quietly, so I figured he understood what was happening. I ordered him to translate and I picked up one of the diary sentence sheets with his doodling on it. "If I give you this piece of paper to take notes during the movie, will you actually take notes, or will I end up with this again?" I held up the filled-in-circles so all the other kids saw it, and most of them had picked up on what was going on. With the help of my translator, I got my point across and the kid finally understood what was going on, he gave a little nod and held out his hand for the paper, so I gave it to him.
I let the movie run for half an hour until the end of class, and I didn't bother checking their notes then, so I don't know if he actually did take any, and he didn't show up again for the rest of summer camp. The problem with summer camps and after school classes is that a lot of kids are signed up by their parents to take advantage of a free babysitting service, so I didn't really care that this kid who hadn't participated in anything up to this point in the three times he had shown up didn't come back for the rest of the week.
After Monday, things got a lot better. The first grade classes were fine the whole way through, but apparently the test idea was a good one for the second graders. When I gave them back their graded papers on Tuesday and they were all marked up in red and the highest score was 12.5/23, they were not happy about it and they voluntarily asked me about various sentences until we had gone through the whole two pages as a class and gone over every error and corrected them all. Combined with Totoro, the second week turned out to be really good.
The only bad spot was when I was told during the second day of Totoro that I wasn't supposed to watch animation and I wasn't supposed to sit down. (During the movie, I would move around and sit different places in the classroom) This didn't exactly please me, considering I had been told I could do whatever I want, so the next day we watched the last half hour of the movie, and I sat through it.
It actually turned out to be the best teaching tool of the summer camp, as after the movie I got the students to go through a full page of vocabulary from the film, and I explained the ones they didn't know one at a time in English as clear as I could, and then I gave them a Korean translation. After that, with vocab in hand, I gave them a full page of dense Wikipedia plot summary of the movie and got them to read the whole thing and then ask comprehension questions about the film and the story, and also more vocabulary. Then after that, I gave them a character list with reflection questions about the movie such as "who was your favorite character?" (the answer was either Totoro or the Catbus, one student said Kanta, the boy) Using that character sheet, the students then paired up and picked a character to create an original story about. They wrote the stories and then I went group to group and helped them with their grammar and spelling. On the last day we made little booklets and wrote the stories in the books with pictures, and then each group read their story to the class. So if the school comes to me to say anything about watching animation again, I can show them 9 original storybooks written in English, by the students, along with the posters in English, and tell them to put that in their pipe and smoke it. Graham said his school was really amazed the first time they saw the posters his students had made (I stole the idea from him) so I imagine my school will react the same way. Plus, he says they like to have things to show off at fairs and such to parents and people from other schools, and I think some English storybooks will be very impressive.
There was one real funny thing that happened during summer camp, but to understand it you need to understand that Koreans have an interesting fascination with head size. It goes way beyond just teasing a kid with a big head, and there are kids with really big heads, but they think it's seriously awesome to have a small head in a way that goes beyond the kind of teasing you'd see on playgrounds in America. This example illustrates pretty well what I mean. I'm sitting in class while the students write their stories, and one girl has taken her handbag and put the handles over her head so it's hanging around her neck. Right as I look up to see this, she takes the bag off her neck, and as she gets her head out of the handles she goes "YEAH!! SMALL HEAD!" in pretty much the most triumphant voice I've ever heard. One of her friends gives a half-cheer and a clap and I just start cracking up.
Summer camp ended on July 31, and I had plans with Ryley and Barney to leave Maseok at 3:00pm to go to Sokcho to start our summer vacation trip.
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