English Summer Camp

During the winter and summer vacation periods there is usually a one-week summer camp held at school for a small group of students to engage with English learning in a fun, interactive, and casual setting. Often, the students choose between different camps such as history, math, English, etc. My co-teacher led a grammar-based English camp for students studying for exams. The native English teacher leads the conversational English camp and chooses a theme. In the past, teachers have held a mystery camp or a Harry Potter camp.

I decided the theme of my camps would be YouTube. The plan was to watch a variety of videos and expose students to different types of YouTube videos such as how-to tutorials, challenge videos, react videos, and music videos, among others. At the end of the camp, students would work together to make and record their own YouTube videos.

The corona-virus has greatly affected the school year and along with that, my English summer camp plans. The school year was initially delayed by nearly 6 weeks and then began with online lessons. As such, our summer vacation was severely reduced. The first compromise shrunk English summer camps to three half-days, but that was further reduced to two half-days when the Korean government decided to grant a special national holiday on Monday, August 17th to help people who were struggling due to the corona-virus restrictions.

Interestingly and frustratingly, despite my boys school not wanting an English camp this year because of the very short summer holiday and renovations at their school, they were over-ruled by the board of education. My contract requires a summer camp so they were going to have an English summer camp whether anyone wanted one or not. Truthfully, I would have preferred a longer break instead of having the camp. In any event, it was decided that I would host a live online camp with my boys school in the morning and a live in-person camp with my main school in the afternoon for two days. 

I was especially worried about the online English camp. How could I make it fun and interactive with the students logging in from their homes? And what about the inevitable technological problems? I felt it was a disaster waiting to happen. I expressed some of my concerns to my co-teacher at the boys school. I was relieved to hear that she was going to join the online camp, and we would be creative and make this work. What I should have been worried about was the in-person camp.

I organized the camp around watching videos of fun activities and then trying out the activities as a group. In fact, the lessons were so interactive that very little teaching would be involved. Good for me.

The semester ended on a Thursday. I had a nice long weekend before the camps were to start on Tuesday. After a few relaxing days, I got a text followed by a phone call from my co-teacher at my main school with urgent, emergency news. With the rise in corona-virus cases, the board of education decided, one day before camp was to open, that all camps would be conducted online. My day off, the national holiday had vanished. I needed to remake the camp and record 5 lessons by the next day. After that, I would need 5 more lessons for day two of the camp. Emergency was right.

After some intense work and lack of sleep, I was ready for the English camps. First was the live, online version with the boys school. We started with some inconvenient technical issues, but eventually, this moved along alright. Despite previous reassurances, my co-teacher was on the video call only to take attendance. Running the camp creatively was solely my responsibility. Bad for me.

Still, I think the boys enjoyed the videos I chose and we had some decent discussion afterwards. I had hoped that students would engage more and speak freely, but I think the online environment hampered that a little. Still, I was happy with their participation level overall. I really enjoyed showing the boys a short video clip of a minor hockey team dancing to Gangnam Style, which was a mega-hit song in Korea. It was a nice way to highlight our interconnections through music and YouTube.

Because the camp at my main school ended up being completely online and the lessons were pre-recorded, I didn't have much interaction with the students apart from correcting some of their homework assignments. This was a disappointing format for a summer camp because I couldn't get to know the students or spend time with them in a small group. But I was very happy with their homework.

In my lesson on how-to tutorials on YouTube, I assigned an origami video and the students were to submit a photo of the end result. They did really well with their folded butterflies. Hopefully, it was more fun than regular English class.

With all of the changes, both in advance and last minute, to the summer camp format, I think I was pretty lucky to have chosen YouTube as a theme. YouTube was the perfect choice for the online format. Since the camps were online anyway, it allowed the students to use that medium to explore English and Western culture. Unfortunately, the key activity of the camp, planning and recording a YouTube video was not possible. Perhaps I'll save that activity for another camp.