One of the hallmarks of teaching English in Korea is the often dreaded summer and winter "English Camp". What is an English Camp, you ask? In it's most basic form, a camp is a combination of daycare and conversation club. It's like English class minus any serious studying. If you plan it right, it's actually really fun.
Now, the name camp is a bit misleading. Before I started teaching I always thought of camp, especially summer camp, as a place where you go for a week or longer and stay overnight and whatnot. In the Korean school system, though, it's just a name for extra classes in various subjects. Cooking camp, guitar camp, English camp, science camp, you name it. Some camps go on for most of the vacation, while some are only a few days long.
I did a winter camp back in January that was 6 days long, but my camp for this summer was mercifully only 3 days. It's hard to keep a bunch of middle school kids interested in one topic for much longer than that. It's also hard to come up with enough material, so my strategy is to choose a theme and just run with it. For my previous camp I framed the camp around telling stories (written, visual, musical), but for this camp I decided to capitalize on the hype around all the recent hero movies and structure my camp around super heroes. Also I'm a giant nerd so. Camp is about having fun more than actually studying hard, so the best thing is to choose something you enjoy, that the students will also enjoy, and just play with them for a few days.
![]() |
| Eternally Marvel biased. No regrets. |
The nice thing about having a theme is that it allows you to do all kinds of really different activities without them seeming too fragmented. By uniting each part under the umbrella of superheroes, it all becomes a lot more cohesive.
As I said, I had three days of camp, and 4 class periods each day, so that means 4 activities for each day. For the first class on the first day, I figured I should start out slow. Some of the students knew each other, but some were from different classes, and all of them were sleepy and shy, so right off the bat I got them standing up and moving around. I learned this game from another teacher, and it's a lot of fun, even if the students hate you for it. Basically, you go around in a circle, and each person says their name, their favorite color, and does some kind of silly movement and sound. Then, everyone repeats your name, color, and the silly movement. I like this because it's simple language that even my lowest levels can manage, and everyone gets to be a bit silly together. I also had them play the Baskin Robbins 31 game, and a couple other easy little games to get their brains awake and thinking about English.
Second period was when we got down to business with my sweet Prezi on superheroes. This was probably the hardest bit, since I had a lot of vocab to introduce about superpowers and whatnot, but my kids were total troopers. After introducing a few famous heroes and common powers, I had them work together to fill out a crossword puzzle. I like this kind of activity, because while some of it may be too easy for the higher level students, they get more practice by helping the lower level students, and it saves me a lot of work. Why do all the work when you can get students to teach each other? A lazy teacher is a smart teacher.
![]() |
| Names are hard to spell. |
The next part was probably the bit I was most looking forward to: Make Your Own Hero! I'd given them the vocab they needed, I suggested the grammar they could use "I can/I have/I'm a hero because" and set them free. They're all so creative, but I so rarely see them allowed to use that creativity in their regular English classes, so giving them that chance is always a priority for me. Even my more quiet students got really involved in this activity. Some were more focused on the writing, some on the drawing. Some really seemed to reflect their personalities, and some were just silly.
![]() |
| Hard at work! |
I don't usually use dictionaries in normal class, but in the context of camp I feel like they're really useful. We're working outside of the book, and there are a lot of situations when the students need to find words that I have no way of knowing. Plus, it gives them the power to seek out information on their own, which I think is really important.
![]() |
| Some heroes are simple. |
![]() |
| Some are funny. |
![]() |
| Some are absolutely amazing. |
After they made their heroes, I had them interview each other. Usually when I do interview activities I give them a set of questions, but for this I had them write their own questions. Some students went pretty basic "What's your name? What is your power?" and some were pretty funny "Do you think you're beautiful?" or "Do you want to eat pizza?" When I'm working with so many different skill levels, I like to keep the activities open-ended. Lower level students can write simple questions and answers while higher level students can do more complicated things. Literally had a couple students that are almost fluent all the way down to a couple students who are still working on the basics. It's a nightmare but it's also fun.
After all their hard work, I figured that the final class period of the day should be a game, so I jimmied a Guess Who game I got from someone else into a superhero guess who game because I'm a lazy jerk. All in all, the first day was a roaring success. It's always a bit hard to get them talking at first, but I was very pleased with the outcomes.
Stay tuned for day 2: The Ongoing Adventures of Chicken Girl.
