Summer School

During the summer, English teachers in Korea are required to teach a week-long summer class. There are no rules for what to teach, and students of all different ages can sign up, so planning can be a challenge. This year I decided to make a Pokemon-themed summer camp.

I was surprised how popular Pokemon still is even after all this time. I have a collection of Pokemon toys in my classroom and a lot of the students know all of their names. It's funny how much things have changed since I was a kid, and yet Pokemon still remains the same, only now there's almost 900 of them instead of just 151.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Pokemon, there are people called trainers who capture wild animals called Pokemon and make them fight each other. The trainers try to collect 8 badges by defeating powerful gym leaders around the country, and after they've gathered all 8 they are given a chance to challenge the champion, the strongest Pokemon trainer in the world. All of the Pokemon have different elemental powers, called types, and the gym leaders all are themed to one of those types.

With that in mind, I setup my lessons in 3 parts: in the first part the students would design their own Pokemon, their starter Pokemon. In the second part the students would complete challenges to gather the 8 gym badges. Finally, the students would complete a challenging activity to become the champion. I was told ahead of time that I should focus on the fun-factor the most, so I set out to make a series of lessons that the students would be able to enjoy even if they weren't great at English.

The Pokemon designing activity was by far my favorite one. In this activity, students chose different components out of a hat to design their own Pokemon. They were each given the Pokemon's body shape, eyes, color, and random body parts to come up with whatever design they could think of. I also asked them to write a few sentences about their Pokemon. The activity was so popular that many of them asked to choose new components to draw more and more Pokemon.

The second part was the meat of the summer camp. There are 18 different Pokemon types, and I chose 8 of these to theme my lessons around: water, grass, ice, fighting, psychic, dark, bug, and flying. The activities we did were related to these types in some way, so for example, in the grass activity they played soccer, in the dark activity they played the Mafia game (a game where you have to lie to the other players to make them think you aren't a villain), snow-cone making for ice, a spelling bee for bug, etc etc. For the water activity, we had a water balloon fight outside. Since some of the activities didn't require any English, I also taught them vocab related to the activity beforehand.

Finally, in the third part we had a big challenge to tie everything together. I designed an obstacle course using components from all of the previous activities, and the first 4 students with the fastest times received special prizes. I think the only issue with this activity was when they had to make paper airplanes and throw them across a line (this was from the flying activity). Making the airplane ended up taking a lot of time and really slowed down the rate that students could go through the course, so if I were to do this camp again I would have the airplanes pre-made for them.

Overall, the students had a lot of fun. It was exhausting trying to manage everything for 5 days in a row, but when I saw how much fun they had with the activities it felt like it was worth the trouble.