English camp

In Thailand, student are required to take English as a second language from 1st through 12th grades. A few times through out the year, they hold what they call English Camps. This is where they gather students from surrounding schools, and for 3 days they have intensive English lessons. If they can have native English speakers participate, it is a huge plus and it just plain old looks good on them! I will reserve another post to discuss its effectiveness and my actual thoughts on it, in this one, I will just tell you what goes on. We did one in March to prepare the students for the English portion of a standardized test that is administered annually, I am not quite sure why we did this one. Last week, we were in Mae Sot doing a training for the English teachers representing 3 different districts. We were to train them on how to run an English camp and this week in Umphang, we ran an English camp for the kids. At the camp, the kids are put into different groups and rotate through about 5 different areas of instruction. The teachers are assigned one area to teach, so we teach the same thing about five time in 2 days. One the first day in the morning, There is a grand opening ceremony with "important" people in attendance. Someone important gives a short speech (no, I do not know what is said, it is all in Thai) and then the important people leave. Then the kids are taught songs, play games and are put into groups. Next they are administered a pre-test. This is to test their current knowledge of the material that will be taught during the camp. Throughout the 3 days, there are a total of five sessions. Each session last 1.5 hours. In the afternoon on the first day, we have two sessions. On the second day, we have two sessions in the morning and one in the afternoon. More games after the last afternoon session on day two. Then on day three, more games in the morning. In the afternoon a post test is administered. Then certificates are given out to the teachers and the students for participating in the camp and prizes are given for various things. Afterwards way too many pictures are taken! No lie, they take pictures for like 5-10 minutes of all of the students from each school with the teachers. Never mind that through out the whole camp pictures are taken constantly! Being native English speakers makes us some sort of celebrities... all of the teachers want pictures with us, it's comical! Overall they make it very fun for the kids and I enjoy it kind of. I like getting to meet new kids, but there are many other things about it that frustrate me, but more on that another time. The camp we did for the teachers followed the same format, since it was to teach them how to do a camp in their respective schools. Overall it is quite exhausting! After each day, I have no energy to do anything but sleep!