Winter Camp Tales

I mentioned earlier that attendance at winter camp is deplorable, and it has gotten a little better (4th class has grown from 2 to 5--of 11 enrolled). Still, at least that means the numbers are quite manageable and students have a lot of opportunities to practice speaking with my immediate feedback.

I have organized the camp by doing different categories of activities on different days of the week; for instance, today is "Circle Time", tomorrow is Video Day, Thursday is Writing Lab, etc. Monday is simply conversation day, and I provide various prompts.

Yesterday was all about jokes and funny stories. To start things off, I had a list of short jokes or riddles in a table (the MS Word kind), with the punchlines on the right. I cut them into strips and cut off the punchlines. These are then distributed to the students. But one student gets the joke part, and someone else gets the punchline: "What time is it when you have to go to the dentist?" Another student has to realize he has the answer: "2:30 (tooth-hurty)" This is tricky since a lot of jokes depend on wordplay, puns and multiple meanings.

And the same with Korean jokes. One of the few that students managed to share was this: "How do you make salt more valuable?" "Divide it in two." In English, of course, this is meaningless, but in Korean, salt is sogum, 소금. Taken separately, 소 means beef, and 금 means gold. Not bad.

Today we played, among other things, Finish the Sentence. First up was "My best friend ..." which elicited some standard answers, physical descriptions and the like, and even a sweet one from a boy whose best friend is in America studying arts (?), who he can only contact on the internet--and he misses him. But one kid confessed his best friend was his computer, and another that his was the TV.

Tomorrow we'll be watching all of the Schoolhouse Rock grammar videos--everyone I know can do a bit of Conjunction Junction, what's your function? But did you know there are nine of them in all?