English Camp

This week the big project was putting on an English Camp.  We, group 124, got help from 2 PCV’s who have been here for over a year.  English Camps are hosted by volunteers in their villages.  The schools have a budget for them and they seem to be very popular.

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An English Camp is an event, 1 or 2 days, where several schools come together to have fun learning English.  Some classes are outside and some inside.  We had 5 “stations” with topics that like healthy eating, healthy life-styles, recycling, road safety.  Each group put together a 50 minute class that included vocabulary words and activities to help students practice/master the words and their meaning.  The group I was in had road safety.  The vocabulary was: helmet, bicycle, left, right, go, stop.  They knew a few words and did well learning the rest.  We had a skit where a bike rider did not wear a helmet, talked on the phone, did not look for cars, got hit and banged up.  Then the same skit was done where the rider did everything correctly.  We led them through vocab for left, right, go and stop and had them turn left, right, go and stop following a leader.  Then one person was blindfolded and someone had to give instructions to avoid trees and “dogs” and “cars”, played by other students.  I remember left and right being hard to learn and it was for some of them too.  Finally, we played Simon Says with the same commands.  Every kid loves Simon Says.  

Schools have funding for the events that are generous.  Peace Corp Volunteers host events and invite other volunteers to come and help.  Seems to be pretty popular country wide and a good way to see each other, help each other and teach English in a more relaxed environment.  Hopefully we will all attend a few before we do our own.  Chris, one of the volunteers from last year, said that emails go out and whoever can come, comes and the villages are very grateful and we gain some status because we put on the camps.  

Everything indicates that Thailand is very happy to have Peace Corp here and tries to support everything we do.  A group of Asian countries have formed a union and English is the common language, so it is important to the country for students to learn English.  We are serving the poor, rural villages so they too can benefit in years to come.  One of our main objectives as teachers is to work with Thai teachers so they become better at teaching English and as volunteers leave, they can sustain progress.  We don’t replace anyone, each site is new for 2 years, so helping teachers is important. The English Camps involve everyone and schools also come together and hopefully teachers form relationships that help them in the future.  

ESL in a foreign country is totally different from ESL in the states.  These kids don’t have the opportunity to hear English every day and pronunciation is hard and foreign to them.  At English camp they hear a lot of English besides what they are directly taught.  We all got to chat with the kids here and there and they do amazingly well.  One group wanted to know if liked Michael Jackson.  It was a fun experience and good training.