Korean Job Discussion Forums

[ucfvgirl]

Well, I have gone through my first week of summer camp and I am truly bored with my conversation class. I have two classes: reading and conversation. The reading class is good because we are reading Charlotte's Web and it's fairly structured and well laid out. However, with my conversation class, I am struggling. I am finding it difficult to find some fun activities to fill 90 minutes. The students are ALL first graders of middle school (7th grade) and are of mix ability levels. The thing I hate most about these classes is that they are not mandatory and therefore the students can choose to come or not come. I am finding it difficult to plan activities, not knowing how many students are going to show up from day to day.

Anyone have any suggestions?

[fizban]

I feel your pain. I had my first day of non-mandatory summer conversation classes on Friday. 1 Student showed up. Awesome.

[mack4289]

If the kids have decent conversation skills (can form questions and use past, present, and future tense) here's a few activites:

- Have one student (Student A) choose a topic of conversation (any appropriate topic, completely up to that student). Then Student A will pick a student (Student B) and Student A will choose between who, what, where, when, why or how. Student B will ask a question about the topic to Student A using whichever question word Student A chose. Then Student B will choose a student and a question word and so on. To make this more challenging, you can tell the students to only use a certain grammatical tense.

- Teach them all the basic grammatical terms (verb, noun, adjective, etc) and then choose two students. Those two students will have to create a six word sentence together. They ask the other students for the words (so Student A will say to one of the students "Please give me a verb"). The students doing the asking decide which space the words go in. At the end, the two students each get a chance to change one word and add one word.

- Use a die or a deck of cards and have one student pick a card or roll the die. Whatever number they get, they have to start a story with that many words. The next student does the same but has to repeat what was said before. So Student A draws a three and says, "I went to" and Student B draws a 4 and says "I went to the store to buy" and so on.

- Make a simple game board with 25 or so blank spaces. You can choose a few topics and assign those topics to spaces on the board (so 1,6,12,18,24 are family and 2,8,14,20 are friends, etc). The student rolling the dice has to answer questions from the other students regarding whatever topic is assigned to the space they land on. They roll the dice after each question to decide if they have to keep answering questions. So maybe if they roll an odd number the questions stop but with an even number the questions continue.

- Teach them conditionals. Have one student ask another, "What will happen if...." and the other student has to answer "If this happens, then this will happen." Or, for the 2nd conditional (right?), they ask "What would happen if...." For the third conditional they can ask "Where did you go yesterday?", "What did you do there?" and "What would have happened if you hadn't gone there?" So the answerer could say, "I went to the pool", "I went swimming" and then "If I hadn't gone to the pool, I wouldn't have gone swimming."

- Have them describe pictures to each other so the other one can draw it. Obviously only one student can see the picture. This is good for teaching describing appearance and location.

[Atavistic]

Language games. Not just hangman. Google "ESL games" and see what you can find.

If you can get your hands on a book called "The Kids' Book of Questions," you should have lots of free conversation topics.

http://www.amazon.com/Kids-Book-Questions-Revised-Century/dp/0761135952

PuzzleMaker is cool. http://puzzlemaker.school.discovery.com/ You can use it to make puzzles with your own vocabulary, could easily supplement CHARLOTTE'S WEB that way (if there's an overlap). And it's free!

Do you know how to play Yahtzee and can you teach them? It's English because you'll make them speak English, but it's also math.

Card games--Go Fish, Poker, Old Maid. You can get packs of cards at the 1,000 shop if you don't have any.

Can you teach them some board games? Chess, Chinese checkers, Scrabble?

Having them work together in small groups to make plays sounds cool, but you've got to find a way to keep them there.

Can you do a week of science? Make balloon rockets one day, do the Coke and Mentos thing another day. Make volcanoes the third day. Umm...if you have some sort of water (a stream or small pond near you) you could experiment making boats with various materials and weighing them down with rocks or whatever.

I hope some of these ideas help or job other ideas. I start camp next week and tried to make it fun stuff rather than reading, reading, reading, talking, talking, talking, writing, writing, writing, listening, listening, listening. Damn kids need some rest and fun during the summer...