Prelude to Winter Camp: A Summer Camp Story

The view from my “classroom”

I’ve been hanging on to this post for a while without finishing it, but as I am about to start my first winter camp with this school, I felt it was time to wrap it up and post it. Winter camp starts in a few days, but this post is about summer camp:

Camp. Home for three weeks.

This past year, summer camp was a completely different beast from the public school version I experienced during my first year of teaching in South Korea. Rather than coming into school during student vacation time to teach a themed week of lessons to each age group whose parents wanted them outside of the house, summer camp at Soopna Ple 10 Year School took place far from our normal classrooms. We rented out a few buildings in the countryside, and we lived there with the students in a tiny community for the duration of camp. Most of our students weren’t even from our school, but were instead from different schools all around Korea. And while it was an intense three-week marathon, it was one of my life’s most rewarding teaching experiences.

Our wacky school’s fearless leader – the principal.

It all started two hours south of Seoul, in the Korean countryside of Chungcheongnam-do about four days before our official camp start date. We packed up a truck full of books (over 3,000!) and teaching materials, broke into carpool teams, and headed south on a Thursday. The idea was to arrive and unpack, prepping the facilities for the massive three weeks of children.

Students’ luggage

This year, we were also doing something a little bit different. We were contacted by a group of students under the Dreamstart program, an organization that provides different programs to stimulate growth and development for low income children in Korea. The ask was to put on a two-day overnight Korean reading camp for the students, so we decided to lend a hand. While they were able to pay some money, the total cost of renting the facilities, feeding the students, providing accommodation, and paying extra staff was more than their budget, so we covered the extra costs.

The main building at the top of the hill.

So, that Thursday we arrived at the camp facilities, which turned out to be one large building at the top of a hill with three smaller ones at the bottom, and we started to prep the area for camp. We spent two days unpacking, cleaning, and moving furniture because while the buildings were used by other people during the year, we had been able to store our furniture and some materials on site in a storage area. We replaced the chairs and desks with large low floor tables, set up our bookshelves, and filled them with our 3,000 books. We moved whiteboards, ground-level student desks, and removed large cabinets that we had no use for. When the setup was complete, we had a functional eating area and several classrooms set up following a section for everyone to leave and store their shoes.

So many shoes. So many smells.

First up was the Dreamstart students, and with a schedule set without English classes, I was paired with the extra staff to help with cleaning and photography. While I didn’t interact with the students much during this two day camp, from what I could see the students were enjoying the activities. Post-camp questioning revealed that the extra camp was tough on the Korean teachers, but they felt it was definitely worth it with the results felt in the Dreamstart students.

On Sunday afternoon, the Dreamstart students departed and we were left with an evening to prepare for our official three week camp. We loaded our classrooms with materials and ended our evening by going to a public bath house, where I spent the night being surprised by seeing all of my male coworkers naked. Apparently, it was a school tradition to go to the public baths the night before camp, and I would soon find out that the teachers did this more often than I was prepared for during other school events as well. Anyway, after our public bathing time, we made our way back to our camp and got some rest before a big welcome the next day.

Little kids trying to speak English to me at lunch!

For three weeks, we hosted several different classes for our students. Each student was assigned a specific lesson track, some of which included three levels of English reading, Korean reading, Korean writing, and picture book reading. I taught the lowest level of English reading, and I actually had none of my normal students in my class.

My class had five boys and two girls, and our focus was on reading and understanding English books. Like most aspects of this school, I was given just that vague outline and allowed to come up with the entire content of the lessons by myself. Armed with a bookshelf with about 300 low to middle level English books, I was bringing back a ghost from my middle school days – plot maps.

Plot maps!

The very base of my English class was reading books and filling out these plot maps to show understanding of the texts. The students had joined this class to improve their reading comprehension abilities, and the expectation was that they read as many books as possible during the three weeks with us, showing some proof of understanding through a writing activity. The Korean equivalent of my class was mostly picking books from a large bookshelf, reading them, and then writing summaries, so it seemed that was what was expected of my class as well.

Coming from a public school where the expectation was that the foreign teacher was there to make learning English fun, I decided to add my own flair to the very basic camp itinerary. In addition to reading comprehension improvement, I expanded my scope to include English speaking confidence, team building, and excitement about using the language. It was a lot to do in three weeks, but I figured it’d be a better time than sticking to just a reading curriculum.

This kid made a snowman out of masking tape.

In order to increase English speaking confidence with my students, I had to create an environment where they wouldn’t be afraid to speak up or make mistakes. The class setup with us sitting on the floor around one large table already made the classroom feel less formal, but we stepped our game up with basic camp games conducted in English. We played games like mafia, the winking game, fake artist, bang, quick draw, and Wah! just to give the students a chance to use casual conversational English while doing a fun activity. Whenever we had a few moments for a short camp game, we were sure to use them playing something stupid but confidence boosting at the same time.

Quick draw!

A more organized way I used to increase confidence was also through team building activities. Have you ever heard of Project Adventure? Essentially, the class is presented with a challenge that they must complete together, and in order to finish the challenge, they must work together and communicate clearly. Once again, English-only communication was strictly enforced. One example of a team building activity was challenging the students to get from one end of the classroom to the other without touching the floor. They were able to use four cloth squares that they could step on, but once a square was placed on the floor, it couldn’t be moved. To make things harder, if at any point a square on the floor was not in direct contact with a team member, even for a split second, I would take that square away permanently. Any student who touched the floor would prompt for the entire activity to start over. We started our fair amount of arguments, but in the end the students learned to cooperate together to accomplish their goals.

Crossing the classroom challenge!

Teamwork challenge!

I was particularly excited about the last goal – to make reading comprehension and speaking English fun. It seemed to me that the process of reading a book and writing a summary or a plot map could be incredibly tedious as the weeks went on, so I decided to gamify it, giving rewards to students who read and mapped out many stories. It just so happened that each of my students like video games, so by the third day I had begun the unexpected beta release of a game I had been developing on and off for the past year in my free time. We took some time aside from our regular schedule to begin World of Brian Teacher (or in this case, World of San Sam), an RPG aimed at increasing English competence while having a good time. The setup was simple – I printed character sheets and had each student choose to create a character from a given set of classes. Some of the options were warrior, witch, archer, etc. with each class having a different set of abilities and different base stats for health, attack, magic, armor, and magic armor. It took some time to explain to the students, but it was worth it.

I don’t remember what was happening, but everyone except for Dong Min (in the back) was super focused.

Moving forward, any student who read and plot mapped over 3 stories each day would receive bonus experience for their character to level, with higher levels requiring more experience points to obtain over the lower levels. With higher levels came better abilities and increased stats for their characters.

English Class love.

In addition, every day we would allocate some time to play the RPG adventure. I had designed several levels, and with each level I drew a maze on the whiteboard. The students would navigate through the maze, with each spot in the maze associated with a mystery event. Sometimes moving forward would cause them to do a team building activity, answer a riddle, battle an enemy, or another random event that was only known to me. Sometimes completing a challenge would result in experience points for their characters and sometimes it would result in an item drop. At the end of the maze, there would always be a large boss battle which was similar to the enemy battle spaces, but much harder and often requiring items. The battles were largely designed around Pokemon battles so the students had an easy time picking up the turn-based attack structure, and this was where they were able to showcase their characters that they had been developing throughout the class. There is a bit more to this RPG game but I’m keeping it secret in case I ever decide to develop it further and sell it hehe.

In addition to our normal class hours, the students had several hours each day to play outside, and we took them on several field trips around historic Buyeo to do some out-of-classroom teaching. I took my class outside to watch the sunset on multiple nights too, even allowing them to play and speak in Korean as long as they would write a description of the sunset in English when we went back inside. We took the students to a local swimming pool, a soccer field for a sports day, and to other places around the area so they weren’t stuck on our campus for too long as well.

Field trip time!

Exploring historical Buyeo.

Late night by the lake.

At the end of camp, we had a large ceremony where all of the parents sat in an auditorium to see some of what their kids had accomplished in three weeks. Some students played music, some recited poetry, and some even put on a play they had written. For my class, we presented this little gem.

After the ceremony, we had a large potluck and gave our kids superlatives before sending them home. This was also a chance for the students to show what they had learned or present any of the materials they had created during our camp sessions.

Now, this sounds like a fun time for all, but the behind the scenes work that goes into producing something like this was unreal. As teachers, we were up until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning every single night planning the next day’s activities and recapping on the previous day’s. We had to care for the kids every second of every day for three weeks, which included cleaning and patching up wounds, tending to the sick, playing with the students, and preparing and serving food. Needless to say, after the camp was over, we were all exhausted.

Sunsets and notebooks.

But it was worth it. Not only was this a unique chance to test run my RPG with students I had never met, but it was also an opportunity to use my creativity in a high-stress environment. Never before had I been able to do many of these activities, and seeing the growth of my students in the short period of just three weeks was amazing. From improvements in reading comprehension to growing closer as a class of friends and beyond, we made huge strides in such a short amount of time.

The worst part about camp was that when it ended, I wasn’t sure when I would see most of the students again. Because the camp is run independent of our normal school, many of our students wouldn’t be starting the next semester with us, opting to return to their schools in their home towns instead. Some wouldn’t be back for winter camp either because of differences in their vacation schedules. It was sad to say goodbye to them, but in an unexpected turn of events, my favorite student (if I HAD to pick a favorite) ended up signing up for our school on the last day of camp, making the move all the way from Jeju to Seoul for the next semester!

WAghgghhhhhh (this kid)

And with the promise of winter camp starting in a few days, I’m unbelievably excited about who we will meet and what we will be able to teach. I don’t even know which students from summer will be back for our winter session, so there will be some pleasant surprises on our hectic first day! All I know for sure is that I’ve said goodbye to Seoul for a few weeks, I’ve got my backpack and my laptop, and I’m ready.

Our brave adventurers.