A simple observation from this so far is that youth staff would be excellent English teachers in Asia, and a lot of English teachers to children in Asia would make excellent youth staff. There are many similar elements, you just throw in the language learning for the English teaching. Tons of the games used in camps/on the ships are applicable in the classrooms here or can be altered to be a language game.
A typical group class of mine tends to border the line of chaos and learning. And that's exactly how I think these classes should be for kids who've been in school all day only to go to another school two or so nights a week for another hour and a half or two hours. There is a drastic difference between one class and the next. I will walk out of some and think "oh that went fabulously, I'm a decent teacher" and then the next is "oh my god what just happened in there??"
The schools I go to have a syllabus of things that must be covered each class and classes are broken up into the 1st half, a break, and the 2nd half. The 1st half starts with a "warmer" and then a review from last class and an activity, then a presentation of new stuff and activities. On each unit, you spend more than one day, so a lot of the times the review leads right into the new stuff. (example for lower levels: One day you learn This is an apple, That is a peach. The next class you learn What is this? What is that?) The first half is all speaking and listening. You're supposed to include drilling (perhaps the most stereotypical thing ...kids repeating things over and over) but you can actually make that fun. You have them do things as a group and also as individuals. I've been playing volleyball recently during drilling - before you serve you must answer or ask questions or what not. Then it's standard hitting a ball around a small room trying to score. Other games are sticky ball (throw a ball that sticks to a board) tic tac toe, connect four, target practice, game boards, anything you can think of to make it a competition sort of. I've played build & battle with the Jenga blocks, bowling, basketball, used foam blocks for building tower, knocking down tower, throwing in to the bucket I hold above my head (i.e. throw them at the bucket/at me/at each other/etc). I've done monte carlo games, running back and forth to complete a task, I've played Never Have I Ever with sort of a musical chairs, loads of word games (think Boggle, Scattegories, lists of words beginning with a letter, word pyramids, etc), I've used the drinking game of Kings and changed it into a language game (categories, lists, do or give out pushups/jumping jacks instead of drinking). Bingo can become word bingo, human bingo, question bingo, etc. The list goes on and on. For the younger groups, What Time is it Mr. Wolf?, hot potato, all the songs from childhood- hokey pokey, head and shoulders knees and toes, london bridge, etc. all work well. It's actually a little ridiculous the amount of game knowledge I have in my head from my past lives, but it makes this job that much easier to plan for.
Then there's generally a 10 minute break where the students usually take a spelling test often given by a Chinese TA (we have a Chinese TA in every class for the most part, most are super sweet girls who are typically in university or maybe just out or what not, and they have a great command of English themselves), and have a quick break. This is also when we put homework on the board
The second half of class starts with bookwork. Often, it's a listening activity in the book or matching or writing something or other. We'll do some phonics fun (there's usually a game at this point!, and then usually some form of reading from a reader or at lower levels test them on the prior units conversation.
Finally, a fun game of some sort at the end. I've gotten in the habit of playing push-catch which is a ball game that I put under the 'listening' category but isn't super language intense. (oops) We played it on the ships with native English speakers all the time, and kids from anywhere seem to like it a lot.
Essentially, it's a lot to fit into one and a half hours.
Once I have a computer again, I will resume posting pictures! Promise!
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