Horse and Pony Show
Teaching February 5th. 2010, 1:58pmThe last day of the children’s camp was replaced by a lot of pomp and the usual Korean camp rituals. One of the old reliable activities for the last day of class is the “letter to parents” activity. No one ever does this activity honestly if they have any experience with it.
It only leads to disaster to let students try to write an actual letter. It looks extra bad when students attempt to write their own creative letter and have lots of mistakes after attending an English camp. “I spent all this money and THIS is the best letter I get as a result?”
I had a prepared note the students could customize available on the projector, then I went through what each line of the letter meant so that the students could pass off the note for their own. Then the students picked the one activity they liked the most to add an individual flavor to the note. Once they had written it correctly, I handed out some expensive stationary. The students then copied the customized, corrected, and proofread letter to the stationary and had a perfect letter.
From there, I taught the proper folding technique for a letter into an envelope (three fold only) and then we made their envelopes pretty to kill the rest of the time. Even the slowest, worst student I’ve taught in years wrote a perfect note home to their parents saying how much fun they had and how hard they studied. It’s a totally a shame to say the students wrote it themselves, but it is expected by the parents. If you don’t do it this way, you’ll have more problems, and no one cares that it is fake. It’s just an odd tradition.
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