English Camp - October 21st, 2023

Today we had an English Camp. This is where we taught 3rd/4th grade students a 1.5 hour lesson in English. We were split into 3 groups of 3 (there are 9 PCV) and we each got about 22 students. We were there to practice teaching to younger kids so as to kind of ease us into teaching English here.

My group decided to teach about basic introductions and basic verbs because many of the kids did not know any English or knew only a few words. We taught introductions;

• Hello

• Good Morning

• How Are You?

• What Is Your Name?

• My Name Is _______

• Where Are You From?

• I Am From _____

We then taught a list of verbs;

• Run

• Jump

• Walk

• Skip

• Clap

• Dance

• Sit

• Stand

We did multiple games to practice/learn the words. We started with a ball toss game to have the kids practice introducing themselves. Most of the class was focused on the verbs so they had more games/activities attached. We played 3 games with the verbs. The matching game; this had 2 stages. One sheet of paper (x2) had pictures of actions on it and we had slips of paper with the English verb on it. We would give a slip to one kid and have them match the word with the action on the sheet of paper. We did multiple rounds of this and then moved onto the next sheet of paper which had the Bahasa Indonesian(BI) words on it and again we had the students match the BI words with the English verbs we gave them. The next activity was Simon Says with the verbs. Actually playing the game was very easy but explaining the rules in Bahasa Indonesian was very difficult because these are not words I or my group had used very often. We played multiple rounds of this as well. The last activity we did was Telephone. This was with two lines and they competed to see who was the quickest and most correct. For this we used very simple sentences with the verbs, like "I ____". We also used some of the questions and phrases from the introductions to review. To finish out the class we gave each student 2 pieces of candy for working/trying hard, took some group photos, and signed a lot of books. For most of these kids, we were the first Americans and potentially the first non-indonesian person they had ever seen, so they were all very excited.

This was a good but overwhelming experience. The second we stepped out of the cars, we were surrounded by little kids, probably around 70-80 of them. With the age of the kids, you kind of always have to be "on" if you know what I mean. Luckily, when I got back home there weren't many kids yet so I had some time to relax and recharge before they all came in the afternoon-evening.