Lingjhou Summer Camp

Last week, we helped out with an English summer camp at Lingjhou Elementary Camp. The camp was only on Thursday and Friday, but we spent the days before that preparing for the camp. Monday was our last day with all of the LETs in the seminar workshops, and then Tuesday and Wednesday, we worked on camp prep. The idea, we thought, was that Lingjhou was organizing the camp, and that our role was merely to interact with the kids in English and to plan specific activities which they told us about. Lingjhou has one of the four English Villages here in Kaohsiung, so according to the schedule, most of the time was to be spent there (us talking through dialogs with the kids at the post office, airport, MRT, grocery store, restaurant etc). However, the week turned out fairly chaotic, and strictly off the record, I would say that it was a very poorly run camp. It was not well organized, things were not clearly explained to us ETAs beforehand, and once we got into the camp and activities did not go according to plan, the entire camp was pretty much dumped into our hands. And again strictly off the record, I would like to say that I officially hate the Hokey Pokey song. That's all. All of us are *really* hoping that classroom situations are very different from English summer camp. Otherwise, it will be a long year...

However, there were also lots of fun things about summer camp. The kids were cute, even if they were disruptive and mischievous (Not that I blame them. If I were a fourth grader, I would not be appreciative if my parents had signed me up for English summer camp the second-to-last week of summer. I can think of lots of things I would rather be doing than learning a foreign language.). Plus we got to do story-telling! I love story-telling! We acted out The Three Little Pigs for them. I was the narrator, for yes, I do still have all of my fairy tale stories memorized. Kristin and Kaitlyn made us all super-cute costumes. After acting it out for the kids the first time, we had them put on all of our costumes and act it out themselves. They seemed to really enjoy it.

The other main activity which we were actually told to plan beforehand was an English song. We tried teaching them the Beatles' "Hello Goodbye" song. Interesting experience... The kids did not seem to like singing... Yet we kept trying all week to teach them other crazy random English songs. The problem was that we ended up with lots of dead time during the camp, and the Lingjhou staff all backed off and basically told us to do whatever with the kids. This left us scrambling to recall every song/game we could from our early childhood. It all turned out fine in the end, but a bit more direction up-front would have been greatly appreciated. As for the ETAs, we learned which of us have special abilities when it comes to crowd control and amusing small children for hours on end.

On Friday afternoon, two of us ETAs were able to practice co-teaching. The week before, we had chosen who would teach with which co-teachers. Kevin worked with Jane (LET) to plan a lesson for the younger half of the children, and I worked with Hsiao-ping to plan a lesson for the older kids. Hsiao-ping is amazing. We met on Wednesday to talk through what we wanted to do (we met at this really cute tea house/cafe, where we sat on cushions at a low table, Japanese style - so fun!), and she showed up with a plethora of books, resources and games which we could use. We decided to plan our lesson around "What you like to do on the weekend." The kids would learn new vocabulary such as "play basketball" or "watch TV" or "go shopping" etc. We had about 14 kids for our lesson, and the other ETAs sat-in to observe either Kevin and Jane or Me and Hsiao-ping. They gave feedback to me and Kevin about our teaching, and my biggest problem was classroom management (which I knew it would be because I do not know how to manage a classroom!). My class had the older kids, and among the boys, about half of them were related to each other or were best friends. Over the past two days, they had already caused lots of problems, and by Friday afternoon, I no longer felt like dealing with them. Perhaps ignoring disruptive children is not the best classroom management style... Something I will need to work on... I just really hope that my co-teacher will take care of classroom management, leaving me to have fun with the kids. I think, too, that it will help when we are in a classroom environment. Summer camp is too loose of an environment, making it difficult to be strict with the kids.


All around, English summer camp was an interesting experience. Pictures and videos of the week are posted in a Picasa web album. The link should be in the top left corner of my blog if you are interested in checking it out. Once you click on the link, the album is entitled "Lingjhou Summer Camp."