We Are Half Way Through The Camp

Time does fly fast. We are already done with our second week of the camp. Due to medical reason, I was absent from the camp for couple days. When I came back, I saw a welcome back message left by my students for me. My co-teacher did a good job with the camp during my absence. I was very grateful to have a motivated co-teacher. He told me that he made the right decision to participate in the camp despite the long trip that he has to make every day. He enjoyed seeing the improvement that the students made, and the camp is a good opportunity for him to practice his English.

 It has been two weeks since we started our Spanish Hat rule. It has proven to work very well to prevent students from speaking in Spanish. My students have been really into it since Day 1. They would catch other students and of course their teachers who didn't use Spanish Hat when they spoke in Spanish. Also, using the ticket out to allow students to leave proved to be a good strategy to reinforce what the students had learned on that day.

                                   Below are photos of what we did to learn about body parts.

Students in group of 4 created their monster by using the body parts vocabulary that they learned. Then they had to present their monster to the whole class, "our monster has one eye, ten legs, four hands etc."

Students were divided in 5 different teams. Each team chose a model, and they had to work within their team to paste the right labels to the body parts.  

A blindfold student was guided by the whole class to paste parts of the face to the right place. 

On Friday, we had our review session of all of the topics that the students learned during that whole week. We played category game where students, in groups of 4, had to put vocabularies under the right category. The first group that finished putting them correctly was the winner. Later, we played Jeopardy where students were divided into 2 groups. There are 3 different categories. Each category began with a question that worth from 100 to 600 points. The higher the point, the difficult the question is. For example, at 600 point with personality category, the students have to create 3 sentences using 3 different possessive adjectives, 3 different family members, and 3 difference personality. They would get 600 points if they could write the 3 sentences correctly with the required components within 1 minute.  Students seemed to do well although they still struggled with the grammar part. We ended our second half of the session by learning how to make friendship bracelets. 

First Week of Osa Peninsula JumpStart

YAY!!! The first 7 days of the camp went very well despite my worries.  I have a total of 19 students from 5 different communities. There were 3 of us facilitating the first week of camp, my co-teacher, another PCV, and myself. I deeply appreciated my co-teacher’s effort for coming to the camp everyday even though he lives in a city that is about 2 hours from the camp site.

Some of my students seem to be very quiet, and I was glad to see that the other students encouraged them to participate in class activities. I also felt really happy to see students who had no problem with the topics of the first week helping students who struggled with it.

On our last day of the first week, we played a blindfold name guessing game to review all of the questions that the students have learned. Basically, the blindfolded student had to point at one person and had to ask that person a question (they could not directly ask for his/her name). Judging by their answer, the blindfold student had to guess who she/he was having a conversation with. It was fun to see that the other students tried to change their voices so that the blindfolded students couldn't guess it correctly. When it came to number practice, we asked students to work in pairs and invent a difficult number. They had to be able to pronounce the numbers that they created. My co-teacher was so impressed with the students’ creativeness that he declared everyone a winner. He told the students that everybody is a winner because in the elementary school they only learned from 0 to 100. Now, they can actually say something that is greater than 1, 000!!!