Olympics Fun

Wondering where I've been in the past few weeks? Sorry, things always get crazy right before the end of school and the beginning of vacation!

With the Olympics starting in just a few days, I planned a week-long English summer camp for my kids, Olympics theme. It's been a LOT of fun so far, despite their relative laziness (I mean, cmon, it's summer!), and my anxiety about flying/maine/projects/wedding.

So far we've done a LOT. Here are some snapshots, if you want to see what camp is like in Korea:

relay race

 We had a "torch" relay. Teams (5 teams, one for each continent represented in the 5 rings) had to balance tennis balls (flame) on their torch (rolled up paper), run down to the end of the room, write a summer olympic event (ex. pole vault) and run back. They had 2 minutes to write as many words as they could, with each person writing one word at a time. If you drop the ball, you have to start at the beginning. Team with the most words won. We played 4 times and added scores up at the end.

flag coloring

The first competition was to create a flag for their team continent. This is the "Americas" team.

London Sightseeing

 Day 3 was a tour around London. Teams had to "visit" 6 different London landmarks and read a paragraph, answer some questions, and then complete a puzzle before moving on to the next landmark. The team who finished all 6 landmarks first won GOLD. This is by far the students FAVORITE activity. It lasts a long time (more than 1 hour) but they were very involved, super competitive and engaged. The puzzles at each station were different: crosswords, word searches, scrambles, cryptograms, sudoku, and a maze.

olympic history timeline

As a history/education major, I always sneak in some history into my camps. This camp the students made a timeline, spanning from the ancient Greek Olympics all the way to the 2012 London Olympics. We only focused on the summer games. Each of the 5 teams were in charge of a time period and had to research facts about 6 different games.

world map and country info

I made this map for another English teacher for her open class last week in front of the principal and faculty. I decided to reuse it for the camp. If you're wondering why Europe seems huge, it's because she was focusing on it and asked for it to be larger, and for the Americas to be smaller!  Each of the teams had to research one English speaking country from their continent: USA, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and India.

team flags

Here are the continent flags some of the students in the morning session made. You can see the small colors circles around them are the medals they've won doing various activities. A gold medal is 15 points, silver is 10, and bronze is 5.

Below are examples of the country fact sheets:

America country fact sheet....loving Obama!

Ireland fact sheet---how cute is the president?