Monday 15 September 2014

Summer Camp 2014

Excited by the crazy colours!
At the end of both of the semesters us English teachers teach an English camp for any students that are interested. I teach camp in both of my schools for 3 days. Some people don't like it but I've always loved camp because I usually have complete control over the camp and it allows me to get to know a few of my students a lot better in that short time.

I always give my camps a theme, some themes I've used before were "Harry Potter camp" and "Pirates Camp". This year I wanted to try a cooking camp as other teachers have had a lot of fun doing this and my mom had sent me some food colouring from Ireland that I wanted to use with my students. So I initially started planning a cooking camp but then the more that myself and my co-teacher were looking up about food colouring we realised that we could nearly do our entire camp around food colouring so we changed the name of the camp to "Colours Camp".

One of my kids wonderful creations!

Here is a quick summary of our camp:

Day 1:

1st period: Introductions and worksheet
2nd and 3rd periods: Soap Making
4th period: Ice cream making

Day 2:
1st and 2nd period: Make coloured spaghetti
3rd and 4th period: Make marshmallow men

Day 3: (My co-teacher did this day by herself as I had to catch my flight to Ireland)
1st period: Toast painting
2nd period
3rd and 4th period: water balloon fight


The students had a lot of fun making the soap and it was surprisingly easy to do! My co-teacher had a soap making kit and they turned out really beautiful and smelled so good too!

Min Woo very happy while making soap

The final result

Some of the girls with their soaps.
After making our soap we began to make home-made ice-cream. This was very easy to do also. You just need a lot of ice, salt and flavoured milk. You put the ice and salt in to a big ziplock bag, then put the flavoured milk into a smaller ziplock bag (making sure that it's closed properly) You then place the milk bag in to the ice and salt bag and shake vigorously for 5 to 10 minutes constantly. We put the students in to pairs so that they could take turns shaking as the ice was pretty cold on your hands after a while (I'd definitely recommend asking your kids to bring gloves in to school for this activity). We had about a 70% success rate and the kids who didn't manage to turn theirs to ice-cream still had a nice milkshake to drink.

Teamwork while shaking the ice-cream bags.

The finished result...it was delicious!
Day two was a fun day. We began by making coloured spaghetti. It was really easy to do and the kids found the colour of the spaghetti quite crazy! First we just boiled the spaghetti as normal, when cooked we drained it and washed it with some cold water to cool it down. We then prepared ziplock bags with the different coloured food colouring in them and put some spaghetti in to each bag. We mixed them for a couple of minutes and then rinsed it one more time. The colours were really cool and we cooked a sauce afterwards so that they could eat the spaghetti.

Some of the spaghetti.

Unfortunately at my city school some of the colouring fell on the ground so we ran out of the ordinary colouring for one team and they had to use one of our flavoured colours. So they ended up with banana flavoured spaghetti, it was, well...interesting.

The yellow one was actually banana flavour.


After eating and cleaning we were on to my final activity for camp, marshmallow people.

One of the great marshmallow men!

We had different types of marshmallows for the kids and it was so simple. We had the flavoured food colouring and they used paintbrushes to make some cool marshmallow people. I then mixed some icing with the different colours to make some hair for their marshmallows. As you can see from the photos I have some very creative kids!




This marshmallow got shot.


And then it was time for me to go to Ireland and get married :)

My wonderful co-teachers and some of the teachers that come to my English teachers class got me this beautiful necklace as a wedding present!

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