Seong-am kids and English Camps

Over the past six months I've gotten to know the kids at Seong-am. I taught everything from first grade to sixth. I was more of a facilitator and helper in most of my classes but as the year progressed I became the lead teacher in the classroom. One way I experienced this was with English camps. English camps are basically classes that Native English speaking teachers have over break from regular school. Usually these camps are usually a week to two weeks. For winter camp, I had two weeks to teach 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders.

Most camps have a theme so for winter, I themed mine Animals for the first week for 3rd and 4th grade. My theme for the second week was at the movies. For the animals week, I taught the little kids the different types of animals and we played games like bingo. I also had the students practice their writing and had them recite the vocabulary to me afterwards. We also did some craft activities like story sequencing for the life of a butterfly. The kids seemed to enjoy it so I'm glad I was able to make it fun for them. We also made a butterfly card that they could write something in it for their parents.

The second week I taught students new vocabulary and a little about Hollywood. They really liked my photos I took in Hollywood, lol. I also let students be creative and draw their own movie posters. Some were creative and drew their own movies while others drew their favorite cartoons. Oh well it was a good exercise anyways. One activity the students really liked was the movie evaluations. I had a movie trailer day where I showed three movie previews and they wrote sentences about what they saw.

During Spring Break, I had another English camp which was specifically on phonics. I had never taught an entire week on phonics before. Each class is about 90 minutes so it's twice as long as regular classes. I themed it as a Dr. Seuss camp because his books focus on phonics. I thought it would be cool to read them some stories from Dr. Seuss and teach them some fundamentals of vowel and consonant sounds. Well the first class, I read Hop on Pop, which went pretty well. However, my co-teacher pointed out to me that the story was too long. I thought it would be good for academic and entertainment purposes but for some reason, my co-teacher didn't seem to like that activity.

I ended up doing some memory games with the kids the next day. The last day I read them the Cat in the Hat. I thought it went well but my co-teacher yet again told me it was too long. I just don't understand sometimes but I understand I should have just read a couple pages and made an activity out of it. The kids had fun though so that's the important thing. This semester I have been given much more responsibility and work as well. Last semester I had some lessons I would prepare and I taught fifth graded and sixth grade. However, these camps have helped me prepare for leading most of my classes.