As many English teachers in Korea know, Korean elementary schools love their winter camps.
Winter camp is not the camp we typically think of – no outdoor bonfires and roasting of marshmallows, it’s actually just extra class during the vacation period.
So, there comes the challenge of planning a winter camp – it’s not supposed to follow the curriculum and be exactly like regular teaching, it’s supposed to be a fun craft filled week (or weeks) of English learning. This is actually a dream for us artsy teachers as winter camp is the chance to get crafty and have more time to teach with a smaller amount of students.
For this year’s winter camp my colleagues and I came up with some great craft ideas to tie into our lessons, all which revolved around winter. For example, we taught lessons on winter weather, winter clothes, winter foods, winter sports and of course, all about the snowman! This allowed us to keep a sort of theme going and made for easy revision of some of the vocabulary and phrases learnt already during the school year.
So here are some of the crafts we did- I urge you teachers to take note as they were very successful and the kids had great fun. J
Making Sock Snowmen!
In this lesson we learn about winter clothes and then dress our sock snow man. Of course, the students were about to make their snowmen outside the norm, many Mickey mouse and superhero snowmen came about…
- A white sock for each student
- Decorative bits such as pompoms and pipe cleaners, felt or coloured paper, etc.
- Stuffing – either cotton balls or even rice
- Elastic bands (rubber bands)
- A hot glue gun
- Enthusiasm and creativity!
So all you do is stuff the sock in two parts. First stuff the bottom of the sock – this is the body so add quite a bit of stuffing. After stuffed into a ball shape, tie the elastic band around it.
Next with a smaller amount of stuffing make the head. Then tie again with an elastic band at the top. With the remaining hold of the sock at the top, fold it over to make a kind of winter hat for the snowman. And there you have it, a white sock snowman ready to decorate !
This was such a hit with our students; here are some of their gorgeous snowmen, including my own! See – teachers can have fun too.
Our other genius idea…
Winter themed wall Hangings!
This is probably the most genius idea of our camp. We decided we needed a craft that could be spread out during at least 4-5 classes of our camp. Wall hangings were the way to go!
- Gather 4-5 pieces of (any) thin cardboard cut into palm size squares – a chance to recycle!
- Glue on white paper to one side of each card for a clean canvas
- Draw a different winter scene on each card, decorate with whatever medium you desire (we chose cut out felt, sand painting and traditional felt tip and coloring pencil)
- Hole punch at each corner of every card
- String together with your choice of colored wool or twine
- Finished! Hang up and display!
And last but not least, it wouldn’t be winter without the New Year in Korea…so we made New Year’s card of course! Because 2014 is the year of the horse we stuck to that theme. We made the easiest pop up cards, thanks to this easy picture instruction:
All you do is pop in the cut out tab the other side and stick whatever you want to popup on top of it! Simple as pie. These were the sample cards I made for the kids to follow, and here is a card made by a student:
So best of luck for your own winter camps, hope this can be of assistance. J
By: Ardyn Baia