Winter English Camp

3rd/4th grade class on break

For the past week and a half, I've been teaching a winter vacation English Camp at my school. I have four classes a day, two with a 3rd and 4th grade group and two with a 5th and 6th grade group. I'd tell you which one is my favorite, but they both have qualities that keep me excited for work every day. My younger group has some of the most adorable little girls and one of the most hilarious little boys I've seen in Korea, while the older group is full of students who find me fascinating and constantly want to talk to me about my American life.  All of the students came on a voluntary basis, so very few of them dislike English (only a couple of them have obviously been forced by their parents to come).

Joon (L) and Alex (R)

Most of the other western English teachers in Korea have the freedom to design their winter camps the way they want. Since my school takes English education so seriously, all of my camp classes are designed to follow along pre-selected text books. Sometimes I wish I had the freedom to change my classes more, but this structure makes less work for me and gives me a bit more of a challenge with my creativity, since this is not a mandatory event and the kids should still have fun.  So I work with what I've got... and so far, camp has been a blast!  The best part of camp is that I have the same students every day, rather than only have each class once a week, which means I develop somewhat of a relationship with most of them. With about 14-17 showing up in each of the two groups every day, I'm even able to remember all of their names! Of course, since it's an "English" camp, they all have English names which are much easier to remember. Well, most of them have English names. One of the girls chose "Serolet" which is not a name I'm familiar with... and one of my boys chose "Joon", which is just half of his Korean name. Most Korean names have two syllables, for example mine is "Joon-Min", so the name "Joon" could also apply for me.

Lena

Lena getting a cookie

I know teachers aren't supposed to have favorites in their classes... but I definitely have mine. In my 3rd/4th grade class, there's a little girl named Lena (leh-nuh... not lee-nuh). Other than my great-niece Abbey, she's the only kid I've ever wanted to kidnap and call my own. But she's a sneaky little devil... every day we give out treats to the kids and yesterday we gave each of them a cookie. Lena managed to sneak two in class, and pull a third one out of the container right in front of me and my camp co-teacher, Mrs. Lee. Before that, she managed to get a handful of taffy from my desk and today she snuck a couple of chocolates out of my office (after eating a chocolate pie). All of this should be upsetting to a teacher, but in all honesty it just makes me love her even more.

Lucy

In my older class, I have a student named Lucy who may or may not secretly be an American. Her level of English is so far beyond the other students, I've had to resort to telling her that she's not allowed to raise her hand anymore. If I called on her every time she knew an answer, the others would never get a chance to speak! But she's also the kindest little girl I've met here. Whenever a student does something well in camp classes, we reward them with a piece of candy. Lucy averages about 8 pieces of candy a day and won a box of chocolate chip cookies last week... and yet, I've never seen her eat more than one piece of candy in a day. I ALWAYS see her sharing her prizes with her friends and she even gives a piece or two to the boys, despite being in the "boys are gross" stage of her life.

Mrs. Lee with 5th/6th graders

The only problem I really have in my winter camp is getting my students to leave... especially the younger class. I literally have had to push them out the door the past couple of days in order to be able to start my 5th/6th grade class. And yeah, a lot of our class time is spent cracking jokes and discussing totally unrelated subjects, but we have the right to have fun. These kids are still technically on vacation... and as far as my personality goes sometimes, I'm still technically a kid!

WE WANT CANDY!!!