Oi Vey!
Winter Camp planning has me so tired! I’m trying to get it all ready and it’s amazing how time consuming it can be.
I decided to do a camp on habitats and animals, and there is surprisingly little on deserts that is easy enough for a ESL student to follow. So I will be making my own…but for everything else there is actually a lot of materials! Which is really nice for me and also makes it easier to entertain my students 🙂
For those of you who don’t know, during winter and summer break while teaching English in Korea, you are contracted to do a Winter Camp. Now these can be 2 or 3 weeks long, and the time varies for each school. The time you aren’t in camp you are “desk warming”, which can also be called,”planning every lesson for next year and running out of youtube videos to watch”.
My winter camp will be three weeks long. every day, I teach two 80 minute lessons; one for 5th and 6th grade, and one for 3rd and 4th grade. A typical day could look something like this:
Hello
Animal Yoga (warm up activity)
Elicit from previous day
Arctic Introduction powerpoint
Write animals names! (practicing)
motivational video on penguins (typically I do these before a powerpoint)
penguin ppt
Put the part on the penguin! (practicing penguin body parts)
I’m a little penguin song and motions
Penguin craft
Making Snow.
This is my lesson for my lower level students, so I focus on simple sentences and make everything very active. They love to learn English so entertaining the lower levels is pretty easy! It’s in 5th and 6th grade that their motivation goes down 
Overall, always give a lot of time for crafts and have a back up video (that matches the theme) or worksheet, just in case 🙂
I like to practice basics with 3rd and 4th and add in a lot of phonics, as well as build on what they know. My third graders LOVE sign language, so I will be adding that for sure!
Anyways, this has allowed me a nice little break…now to continue in my day and plan some more! Planning 30 lessons and make the worksheets to go with them is not the easiest thing!
dutchexpression.wordpress.com 