How do I organise a summer camp?

[mobiiart]

Hi,
I am teaching conversational english to 14-15 year olds in Thailand. I have been asked to run a 2 day English camp for one of the local schools. This is only my first year teaching here, and I am not sure how to set this up. I have plenty of games for them to play, and some basic ideas on a short lesson before each game to prepare them. I am not sure on how to set the whole thing up as an organized package though. This is the first camp of its kind in the area. If I do well, I can get more extra jobs like this to suppliment my income. Can you recommend a basic 8 hour (4 hours each day) plan or outline to try and follow, so I keep this activity running smoothly and efficiently? I want the kids to learn, and to have fun, but I need to look sharp doing it for the school also. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

[Lucy]

Dear Mobiiart,

There are two possibilities for organising your summer camp. You could organise your classes around themes or make project work the centre of your lessons. You could of course, do both. I agree with you that if you have short preparation lessons and then games, it is difficult to link everything into an organised package.

You could choose a theme for each day e.g. music, sports, families, work, different cultures. Your choice will depend on the level of your students, the materials you have available and the students’ interests. You can then choose activities that are linked to the theme; make sure you cover listening (this could be songs and video), speaking, vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. Of course, you can include games in this and you can include a game at the beginning of each day as a warmer. The warmers don’t necessarily need to be connected to your chosen theme. You can include reading and writing if this is appropriate to the objectives of the camp. A good way to proceed is: warmer, listening, speaking about the listening, language work from the listening or other source, more speaking. Generally, get them speaking English as soon as they come into class; listening goes before speaking and reading goes before writing. By taking a theme approach, your lessons will have a common thread which makes them better organised and the students will be using similar language throughout the day which will help them remember it.

As for projects, you can ask students to work on a particular topic to produce something concrete and tangible. Given the amount of time you have, I suggest you pick the topic of the project; this could be producing the front page of a newspaper, preparing an ad for a video game (for a magazine or television), producing a poster for visitors to their town or country. You will need to pre-teach a certain amount of vocabulary and language structures; this will depend on the theme you have chosen. If you decide to do a project, I think it is best to spend some time each day on it, rather than doing all the work in one day. Remember to include some time at the end of the camp for students to publicise or display their projects to classmates (or summer camp staff). They’ll have worked hard on their projects and it’s nice for them to show it off.

For more ideas on projects, you could look at the following:

http://www.tefl.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=761

If you would like more ideas, please feel free to write in again.

Lucy