El Campamento

I realized I have yet to write about what I really came to Spain to do: the World Partners English Camps.
There are two camps, a morning camp for kids and an evening camp for adults.

The month long camp for adults consists of an hour of class and an hour of conversation practice each night, Monday through Thursday.  This camp meets at the church, La Iglesia Bautista Monte Sion.  The students vary in age from 13 year olds to 60-somethings.  They are split up into three classes according to their level of English knowledge.  Ben Klimek teaches the Advanced class, I teach the Intermediate class, and Jessica Beldon teaches the beginners.  We were required to have a syllabus and lesson plans for our class a few weeks in advance, but upon beginning the classes, many changes had to be made to my meticulous plans (second post).  Creating a classroom environment and activities that are interesting and relevant to both 13 year old boys and 40 year old women continues to be a challenge for me.

The kids camp takes place at La Escuela Oficial de Idiomas (the official language school) of Alcoy.  The children are at the school from 9:30 to 1:15 Monday through Friday.  The camp is 10 days long.  We will have put on two complete kids camps by the end of July.  Ben, Jessica, and I each teach three times during the ten day period.  Our teacher for this TESOL practicum (teaching English to speakers of other languages), Lisa Oglesbee, will teach on the tenth and final day of both camps.  The students visit four stations during the day, each for 45 minutes.  Each day is assigned a different country that speaks English, and each station follows a theme of that country.  The other stations are sports, music, and art.  We also come together for a snack, mid-morning, that consists of a bocadilla (a sandwich), a desert, and a juice.  [Here, they don't mess around when it comes to snacks and meal times.]  There are four groups of kids that rotate through the stations.  5-6 yr olds, 7-8, 9-10, and 11-12 yr olds.    The idea was to teach the same English lesson to all groups.  As you can imagine, it is quite a feat to make a lesson palatable to both a 5 year old and a 12 year old.

FLEXIBILITY has become our watchword here at English Camp Alcoy.