English camp

     It’s been awhile since my last entry, this is partly due to laziness and partly due to a severe lack of internet connection. Well if I remember rightly my last blog was about my first week and a half of teaching practice. If I repeat myself its due to the fact I don’t have the internet and can’t check as to what I have written in my previous blog.  So the second week of teaching practice was an eye opener. After getting used to the kids being better at speaking English than me, it was a shock to the system to have kids that were very basic.

     My second week began with an English camp, an English camp is where a group of kids, ranging from 40 up to 5-600, luckily our English camp didn’t have this many kids and only had 70. But this didn’t make any difference; we (myself, Kaley, Maggie and Jerry) were not prepared for such a large number. When we were told that we had an English camp we were expecting a group of about 40 kids with which we could keep in one group and work together while playing our games we had prepared. This, however, was not the case, the 70 kids were split into 5 groups of about 24 (I say about but if there were exactly 70 kids this would be exact, but I expect that there were not exactly 70 kids) when this happened we all looked at each other in panic.  Luckily we had arrived late and only had time to play one game before lunch, which however, went Pete tong. We had about 12 balloons with the individual letters to make up a word associated with birthday parties, our first problem came when we tried to explain what they had to do, me and Kaley had to demonstrate, we had to run to the balloons in the corner of the big hall and sit on the balloon. They understood this after our rather stupid demonstration, but then they had to collect the letters inside the balloon. This was our next problem, when they popped the balloons they left some of the letters on the floor as they had exploded everywhere. Then when they got the letters back it took them a while to work out the word but when they had we still had quite a while left, so we made them get another balloon and then made them make as many words as they could, most of the groups got about 4 – 15 words, but one group managed to get 42 words, all spelt correctly. So while lunch was on we worked out what we going to do after lunch. We had the games we had prepared but realised that most of them were too advanced for the kids on this camp and we didn’t have the materials we would need. So I decided to go back to basics with my group and do colours, I wrote 4 different colours on A4 paper and stuck them to trees and signposts outside, I would shout out a colour and they had to run to the right colour, and the last one there was out. As this didn’t last very long I had to think on my feet, I decided to walk around a bit pointing at random things and getting them to tell me the colour. Once we got to a bunch of benches in the shade we sat down as the kids were complaining that they were ron which is Thai for hot, I had to agree with them, they were in shorts and t-shirts, I was in trousers and shirt, so I decided to teach them ‘what is your favourite colour? My favourite colour is _____, I then played my game with them again. This worked well and after I had done it with one group I got better and better. We finished the day by putting them into 2 lines, one side had a water balloon and they had to throw it back and forth until it burst. After about 5 minutes we split them up again, this time the ones with water balloons left in their hand up one end and the rest down the other end, while Kaley made sure the ones without water balloons stayed where they were, I mimed to the other lot that on the count of 3 throw your water balloons at the other lot, despite their limited English they got this on the first go. So after a stressful start to the day we ended on a high with a lot of rather wet kids smiling and laughing.