The Deal with Winter Camp and Desk Warming

Winter Camp

Winter English Camp is a camp during winter vacation that most public school teachers are required to teach.  Depending on your school, it can range from a few days to a few weeks.  During the rest of the school holiday, English public school teachers are still required to come in, even though there are no classes and no other teachers.  We affectionately call this time "Desk Warming."

Winter Camp is entirely in the hands of the English teacher.  (Or, most are.)  I was the one who planned it and taught it.  It runs from 8:30-12:30, with the afternoons free for planning.  Mine was set up so that 9:00-9:40 was 1st/2nd grade for two weeks, and 9:50-12:10 was 3/4th grade for the first week and 5th/6th grade for the second week.  I had 18 or so 1/2nd graders, around nine 3/4th graders, and two 5/6th graders.  Yes, two.  (Six signed up, and three came the last day). 

From what I can tell, the school doesn't actually expect the kids to greatly improve their English at Winter Camp.  It's more about having fun doing silly activities and reviewing/picking up some new vocab along the way.  Initially (before Summer Camp) I had been excited for the camps to teach new grammar and subjects outside the book, but I quickly learned that the kids are in vacation mode.  Oh, and they don't particularly care about English.  Did you care about High School Spanish?

Supplies

My school has a pretty good English budget, and they offered us a few hundred thousand won (a few hundred dollars) for Winter Camp supplies.  I made a list of what I would need for the activities, my co-teacher got the list approved, and we went shopping together with a school credit card.

Some schools have really low budgets, and every school is slightly different in their approach.

My supplies included colored paper for projects, tape, balloons, cookie ingredients, etc.

Ideas for Winter Camp

Waygook.com will save your life.  Really.  It's a site where ESL teachers in Korea upload lesson plans, games, ideas, and other materials (crosswords, worksheets, etc.)  It has forums for different themed Winter Camps: Harry Potter, Space Camp, Olympics, etc. and they are filled with really useful material. 

For 1st and 2nd grade, I did a simple craft/art project about very basic vocabulary every period.  For example, we learned some weather vocabulary, colored umbrella top cutouts, and taped them to chopsticks.   

3+4th and 5th+6th I was able to get more advanced.  We learned English songs -- I printed out the lyrics with a bunch of words removed for them to fill in -- and made/ painted paper mache heads, played review games, watched Elf, did an Egg Drop, and made no-bake cookies.

Ideas that flopped:

1) Making a music video.  This might have worked if my kids were all outgoing/dancy/enthused about memorizing an English song.  They weren't. I have some pretty terrible footage of a few kids mouthing "Love me do."  Lots of blooper footage.  Maybe I can make a blooper movie and add the real bits at the end. 

2) Learning feelings, writing them in the snow and taking pictures.  Also, snow angels.  The kids had zero desire to go outside "Teacher! COLD!", which was understandable -- most of them had no hats or gloves.  (Dear parents...). 

Also, in spite of showing an inspiring Youtube video about how to make snow angels, my kids weren't enthused about trying them out.  Except one boy who ran ahead, stopped still, and then flung himself face-forward into the snow, flailing his body around.  It was beautiful.

3) S'mores.  This wasn't my idea, nor is it my story, but it makes me laugh so I will share it.  My friend Asrune has a tumultuous (read: bizarre/insane) relationship with her co-teacher.  Asrune sat down with her before camp to go over the supplies that the co-teacher would need to get for the Winter camp.

They discussed s'more ingredients for about 20 minutes, with Asrune explaining very carefully what a s'more was, and giving her a list of optional types of chocolate, graham crackers/biscuits, and marshmellows.

When Asrune returned from vacation to start winter camp, she looked at the s'more ingredients that had been supplied.  Well, actually, she didn't know they were s'more ingredients because they were so off-base -- she assumed they were random snack foods.  Here is a breakdown of her co-teacher's s'more ingredient interpretation:

Graham crackers became: Ritz cracker cheese sandwiches. 
Plain chocolate bars became: chocolate candy bars
And the topper -- Marshmellows became: MINI SAUSAGES.

What? 

Yes.  She couldn't find marshmellows and thought that mini sausages would be an appropriate substitute. 

Desk Warming

There are a ton of complaints about desk warming because it seems pointless and inefficient, and other teachers have the vacation days off.

I kind of enjoy it.  They're paying me to relax in a warm (oh yes, the heater is on when I'm here alone) room with internet access, a phone and a fridge.  Nobody checks up on me, and I have no work to do.  Which means I get to blog, read, write, take care of emails, make phone calls, Skype, and watch Community.  Which is so.amazing.love.

When camp ended last week, the kids whined and asked if they could visit me this week.  I gave them an hour on Monday and Tuesday.  I have no idea if I'm breaking laws, but I assume I'm not.  Today they came in and we watched K-pop music videos.

Kpop is the Korean pop music genre.  It consists of a million all-boy and all--girl pop groups that have around eight people with the same height, body, and face (they change up hair colors).  The girls are really cutesy with long hair, big eyes, and scaryscarytiny little waists.  The boys are the same, but with shorter hair and angstier expressions.  They mostly sing about relationships, from what I can tell of the English phrases thrown in (Girl, you're my caffeine; so I love you, so I hate you...)

They've got some catchy songs.  It's pop.  Here's a Girl's Generation video called "I have a boy." 

    

 One of the extremely popular boy bands is called Beast.  (Which has made for some fun English lessons: "No, not I want to meet the Beast.  Just Beast.)  Here is their song Bad Girl.

One of my kids spazzed out when showing me a video of them.  "Handsome!  Ohhhh!"  She turned to me and pointed at the screen.  "Handsome?"

I shrugged.  "They're so little."

"What?"

"Uh.  Baby.  Baby."  I made baby rocking gestures and pointed at Beast.

"Teacher, no!  No baby!"

"Yes!"  And then I told her I was 66.  She freaked out and started jabbering to her friend who also freaked out.  They pulled up Google Translate and typed in "How old are you?"

I repeated 66, and translated "Plastic Surgery."

"???"  They pointed at my face.  I pointed at my eyes, nose, chin, and then made a waving motion over my body.

One of them typed some Korean into Google Translate.  "66, huh?"  Not a bad translation.

And then.  "Her face is 20."

I laughed.   "Thank you." 

Posted in: ESL Korea 2012, ESL teaching, Korea, Winter Camp