English Summer Camp 2011

Way back, in the last 2 weeks of July, it was hot and humid and raining lots which meant: 

a) that it was another sticky Korean summer 

b) I was spending all my free time researching what we would do on our holiday

c) it was time for another English "Camp".

Yes, it was English Summer Camp 2011 and my first camp at my new middle school in Hanam. In fact, this was our third English camp in South Korea and we were starting to feel like old hands at it by then I think. (To read about our previous English camps or to have a look at our old materials, click here for Summer 2010 and Winter 2010). In common with "camps" at both my previous school and Rowan's school and in fact most (if not all schools) in Korea, there wasn't a scrap of canvas in sight and certainly no camp fire as camps here just mean an extra curricular program which the kids attend during the holidays. 

It's the end of the road for canvas fans.

Last days in Gwangju-si

So May was rushing by and the day that we would have to leave our lovely apartment in Gwangju -si drew ever closer. Yes, the day we would have to move all our crap out of our massive 3 bedroom apartment in Gwangju-si and take it to our new, much smaller place in Hanam was nearly upon us. We weren't leaving voluntarily but because funding cuts had meant that my job no longer existed so I'd got a new position at a middle school in Hanam, a larger city a few miles away, closer to Seoul.

The sun sets on Gwangju-si (sorry bad pun)! As seen from the back window of our apartment.

Goodbye Gwangju, hello Hanam

Careful readers of this blog may have noticed that we are more than a little behind in our posts, well I say ours, Sophie is still keeping going, I haven't posted anything in so long that I barely remember it's existence! Well there is a reason that we got so far behind, and to understand why you have to cast your mind back to a lovely spring day back in March this year...


Everything was planned out for for the next year, we'd decided to stay at our schools, which despite their idiosyncrasies weren't bad places, we were used to the curriculum, we'd built up good relationships with the students and teachers and were generally looking forward to doing another year. Then it all fell apart. Sophie got called down to the office at her school one morning to discover that her school wasn't going to be able to renew her contract. It seems that the organisation which runs the foreign teacher's program (called GEPIK) had decided that it was going to "streamline" it's hiring process to make it more "efficient"  - bywords for money saving job cuts if ever I've heard them! So their decision was that there would only be two periods a year when foreign teachers could be hired (in September and March) and there would be no hiring outside of these months. Unfortunately for us, we were hired in May (outside of the hiring months) and missed the cut off date for the new rule being introduced by five days!

New school year, new strict routine

Way back in March, we started the new school year with a fresh batch of 1st year middle school students (12 -13 year olds in Western age) to shape and mould in our own image (I wish). In Korea the school year runs from March to February rather than September to June like in the UK. We both had high hopes for the new school year and wanted to enforce a consistent and straightforward discipline/rewards system to try to instigate better classroom management this time around.  

One of the problems with being a native English teacher in a Korean public school is you usually don't have any teaching experience and are just dropped straight into teaching a class of 35-40 kids s soon as you get to your new school. No support, no training, no guidance on what you should be doing and not even a chance to sit in on other teachers' classes to see what they do. At least that is our experience anyway. In fact, I've met teacher's who have had to teach a full day of classes straight off the plane before they've even seen their apartment, let alone had a chance to recover from jet lag or anything. This means, of course, that you end up learning everything as you go, from lesson planning, effective classroom management to how to use the classroom equipment and what the school actually expects you to teach in your lessons. One of the many disadvantages of this is that for many people, including us, the first few months of your new job teaching English in Korea can be confusing, frustrating and stressful. I remember how difficult it was for me to get even the smallest amount of information out of my Korean co-teachers when I first started. 

Harry Potter Winter Camp 2010-11

We're deep into winter vacation here at the moment, it's extremely cold (-18°C on my way into work yesterday) and, because it's vacation time, and all the kids and most of the teachers are away, I'm sat in my classroom desk warming again. Oh, the many splendoured joys of desk warming, every Native English Teacher's favourite vacation activity. For those not in the know, 'desk warming' is a bizarre Korean educational concept that involves the Native English teacher coming in to school during the holidays to sit at (warm) their desk despite having no classes or any work to do - keeps us out of trouble I guess. We are given 4 weeks of vacation time in our contract so that's just what we get. Still, it's a good time to reply to all those emails, update the blog and watch all those movies you'd never thought you'd have time to see - all on someone else's heating bill!

The road my school is on was covered in a thick, undisturbed layer of snow for most of the duration of my camp.

Icicles hanging off the shelters next to the sports pitch at Rowan's school.

So, what have we been up to so far in the winter vacation period I hear you ask. Well, we've been away in Thailand for the last 2 weeks on holiday, hence the blogging silence (more on that later). But before that, Rowan and I were both running our Winter English camps at our respective schools. We both had to run English camps back in the summer (http://bloodriceandnoodles.blogspot.com/search/label/Summer%20camp) so we knew what was required of us this time around and this time we were smart and worked on the camp preparation and materials together so we only had to do the half the workload! As with the summer camps, there is no actual 'camping' involved it's just an extra couple of weeks of 'fun' English classes that the students can sign up to for free if they want to (or if their parents force them too!).

The theme for our camps this year was Harry Potter as the new movie had just come out in Korea at the time and lots of our students seemed really into it. Also, there were loads of useful ESL materials and ideas available online (in particular a really big, helpful thread on www.waygook.org http://waygook.org/index.php/topic,1026.0.html) related to Harry Potter which always helps. Both of our camps were scheduled to run over two weeks with us seeing 2 different groups of around 10 students for an hour and a half each in the morning, so 3 hours of teaching a day. This was much better than my Summer Camp set up where my school had made me teach all of the camp in one week in all day sessions (9am - 4pm solid teaching with an hour for lunch) with no help and no prep time - that nearly killed me. My camp started a week earlier than Rowan's so I got to be the trail blazer and test all the material first. We'd planned the camp along the lines of the classes that Harry and his magical chums take at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry so each day had a different theme. The subjects we covered included Shopping in Diagon Alley, Magical Creatures, Herbology, Potions, Defense Against the Dark Arts and Divination. We also had that old camp favourite, Movie Day, the day when the teacher gets a bit of a break!

If you happen to be an English teacher reading this and you want to use some (or all) of our ideas/materials for your camp, you can find the files online. Rowan has put the whole thing into a zip file which includes lesson plans, presentations, worksheets, fonts, and EVERYTHING else you need for a camp aimed at the first two grades of middle school. Obviously, it could also be adapted for other ages too. The zip file also includes Korean subs for the Deathly Hallows movie if you need them. Please feel free to use the materials how you want and have a look at the readme document as it contains some learning points and suggestions for ways to improve the camp based on our experience. Drop us a message if you have any questions about the camp. Here's the link - http://www.megaupload.com/?d=7FGH3PG7

On the first day of camp, we did the usual thing of getting the kids to choose English names, explaining the rules and splitting them into teams for the rest of the camp. We split the kids into four houses (teams) named after the Hogwarts Houses: Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Slytherin. Predictably enough, nobody wanted to be in Hufflepuff from either of our camps and Gryffindor was the most wanted out of all the team names. Weirdly, the Slytherin kids from both of our camps were actually really sweet and well behaved - not living up to their house name!

Each team had to draw a banner for their House name. This is my Slytherin team's effort.

This was perhaps my favourite house banner attempt as it was a hybrid of 3 of the houses - all except the evil Slytherin of course!

For the second day of camp, we covered shopping. This involved the students performing role plays where they had to return a faulty item (a cauldron or wand or something magical) and either ask for a refund or get a replacement. Getting them to write and perform the role plays was quite hard work but they did enjoy the part where we made wands out of air dry clay and chopsticks! Day 3 was Herbology, or the study of plants in muggle terminology. That involved learning some new vocabulary, playing a game and planting some fast growing little plants we had got from a pound shop (or dime store for you Americans out there) called Daiso. The plants were a mixture of basil and Winter rocket and they came as seeds with individual pots. The students loved this part of the lesson and had great fun getting dirt and water all over the place while planting the seeds. We took the plants home with us for a week or so to keep them warm as both our classrooms were extremely cold when there was no class on (i.e. without the heating on) and then brought them back once they had sprouted to give back to the students to take home with them. On day 4, we covered Mystical Creatures and made origami dragons as part of the lesson. I had been worried that making the dragons was too complicated and it would fall down flat in the class but I needn't have stressed about it. My kids were great at origami and most of them were racing ahead and adding their own personal touches to their creations.

Wands and origami dragons from Rowan's camp.

Clay wands from my camp including an unusual gun shaped wand made by one of my more violent students.

Luckily, all the little plants from my Herbology class sprouted and the kids actually seemed genuinely excited about taking them home with them mid way through week 2.


Amusing worksheet from Rowan's camp: the kids had to design their own magical plant. This is a wing tree, If you eat its seeds you will grow wings on your back and be able to fly.


Amusing worksheet number 2: Eating this flower will cause you to become invisible.

Origami dragons made by my students in the Mystical Creatures class.

This boy was so good at origami he managed to make 2 dragons at once and produced a tiny one to sit on the back of his ordinary sized one - very cute!

Amusing worksheet no. 3: designing a magical creature this time. This is a "quill ray man walrus to the swordfish moose scorpion pig tail is the monkey is anteater hippopotamus rhinoceros the bison antelope is goose octopus..." and apparently it looks like an alien.


Another magical creature: This one is called a "masnaken" and it eats human food like pizza but sleeps and lives like a snake and can shoot poison from its mouth.

I think by far our most successful and popular lesson was Potions class on day 5. In fact, one of Rowan's students told him it was the craziest thing they’d ever done! The idea of the class was to teach them some vocab and get them following instructions in English whilst having fun and making something vaguely fit for human consumption. First, we got them to make two potions, a polyjuice potion (in the books/movies this potion allows the drinker to turn into somebody else) and a truth serum. Rowan did all the work on this and put his science bent to use, particularly for the polyjuice potion, which was made using red cabbage juice (mm mm!) as a base and then adding various acids and alkalis (such as baking soda and orange juice) to make it go through a series of colour changes which was pretty cool. Both the potions looked quite unusual when they were finished but the truth serum probably looked the least palatable. I think more of my students drank them than Rowan's but I still had one kid who dashed off to the toilets after "one-shotting" his brown, bubbling pint of truth serum!

Ingredients for the potions: Slug slime (pancake syrup), unicorn blood (cola), mandrake juice (lemonade), spider blood (orange juice), dragon blood (cabbage juice), dirt (cocoa powder) and fairy dust (baking soda). Delicious!

Making the colour changing polyjuice potion.

Mr "One shot" shortly before he made his speedy dash to the little boys room.

Some of my students actually liked their potions but Kevin clearly didn't.

Rowan's students wouldn't drink their potions apparently. Not surprising if they made them look like this!

The next stage of the Potions class was to get them to make ice cream in a bag - magic ice cream of course! The basic idea is that you put milk into a small freezer bag and then put that bag inside a larger freezer bag. Then put some ice in the larger bag and add salt to the ice. This creates a reaction which causes the temperature to be lowered and so freezes the milk and turns it into ice cream. Cool science! It was freezing outside so I wondered if they would actually be into this activity but it seems that winter is the time to eat ice cream in Korea as they believe that you should eat cold food when its cold and hot food when it's hot, weird but a bonus to our camps. We gave the kids recipe cards and used an online video to explain the instructions on how to make the ice cream. Then we cracked out the ingredients (cartons of flavoured milk, salt, ice cubes, sweets and candy to go in the ice cream) and the freezer bags for them to make it in and let them get started on it. It was messy but great fun.

Step 1 - Pour the flavoured milk into a small plastic freezer bag and seal it carefully.

Step 2 - Add four cups of ice to the large plastic bag

Step 3 - Put the small bag inside a large plastic bag and seal it.

Step 4 - Add five spoons of magic freezing powder (salt) to the ice, not the milk, as one of Rowan's students did - it doesn't taste good if you do that!

Step 5 - Shake the bag for about five minutes or until the ice cream is frozen.

Step 6 - Take the small bag out of the big bag. Open the small bag and eat the ice cream.

Step 7 (optional) - Teacher should try to steal ice cream and/or candy from the students.

We kicked off week 2 with a Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson, which was really just an excuse to play silly games. We played a couple of pretty amusing games, Goblin, Goblin, Draw and the Dragon Egg Relay Race. the first game was set up like a duel but instead of shooting bullets at each other the two participants had to shout out the vocabulary word associated with the picture that was taped to their opponent. The dragon egg race was just like a good old fashioned egg and spoon race but with ping pong balls instead of eggs as we didn't want our classrooms to be splattered in raw chicken ovulations. We also played Harry Potter Top Trumps using the beautiful cards that Rowan had painstakingly made. The kids loved the top trumps, even the girls got stuck into it and at the end of every class that week they would ask me if they could get the top trumps cards out to play a few games before they went home. It became hard work getting rid of the students at the end of the morning!

One of my students from Ravenclaw House running with the dragon egg (ping pong ball) balanced on his spoon.

The teams had to race to the white board with their "egg" and spoon. I'd written VOLDEMORT on the board and the idea was that the kids had to write a word beginning with each letter, taking it in turns to write one word at a time and then race back so their next team mate could write the next word.

Playing Harry Potter Top Trumps.

The next day we did a class on Divination (talking about the future) which was mainly about practicing future tense and completing a few worksheets but we kept it pretty light and fun too and played a video clips prediction game, where each house had to make predictions about what they thought would happen next in a series of different videos incl. sports and science experiment clips. The video clips game went down well and the students seemed to particularly enjoy the science experiment clips. The next day was a lesson on Muggle Studies (to the uninitiated, muggles are people who don't have any magical powers) where we looked at muggle vs magic transport. That was quite a fun class and we played some more card games to round it off, this time Go Fish with transport flashcards. Then it was my favourite day (only joking!), Movie Day. We let our students vote for what film they wanted as we had copies of all of them with Korean subs. Both mine and Rowan's students voted to watch the latest Harry Potter movies, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows". On the last day, we did a camp review class. This involved sending the kids off on a crazy scavenger hunt, playing some games to review what we'd learnt, giving out certificates to the students for "graduating" from Hogwarts and declaring and rewarding the winning teams.

The scavenger hunt involved students working in groups to follow instructions such as taking photos of certain things on their phones, finding items around the school and other random challenges such as singing a song in English or, in this case, drawing a picture of Harry Potter riding a giraffe.

One of the award certificates we gave students for graduating from Hogwarts school (our camps!)

One of my students' had their birthday on the last day of camp so I got her a cake to celebrate.

Rowan's boys with their graduation certificates.

Overall, I think our camps were both pretty successful. I enjoyed this one much more than the summer camp as I knew better what I was doing and I wasn't so exhausted as I was doing it over 2 weeks instead of one. English camp is the best time to get to know at least a few students better as in ordinary day-to-day teaching in a public middle school it's very hard to get to know the students as individuals as you see a class of 30 - 40 students once a week for 45 mins and that's it. I prefer camps mainly for that reason. Also, camps give the teacher a lot more freedom as you're on your own usually and you teach what you want to, no textbooks, which is much more fun, though more preparation work of course. Not everything went to plan as is usually the case with teaching. There seemed to be a higher student dropout rate for the winter camp than there had been for the summer one, perhaps because of the harsher weather. This meant that there weren't enough students to have two separate groups so both Rowan and I put our 2 groups together and ran the sessions for 2 hours instead of 2 x 1.5 hours classes. This was good for us as there was less teaching time and good for the students as the classes were bigger, more lively and we had more time for activities. We both found that the first few lessons were a little weaker than the later stuff but maybe some of that was because of the awkward atmosphere which can exist in the first few days of a camp. In general though, it was a good camp and the kids were cheerful and enthusiastic. I was actually a little saddened when it was over - not too much you understand - just a little.

My 5 minutes of (semi) fame

My school has a rather nice TV and audio broadcasting suite that I get to use every week and that hosts a student radio broadcasting club so I'm told. Usually, on Thursday and Fridays mornings, I have to come into school early to do an English audio broadcast to the whole school called "Morning Class" which is a kind of annoying as I hate getting up any earlier than normal. Also, there always seems to be some kind of problem with it - either the sound doesn't work or the video we have to show to the students doesn't work - always something and everyone in the whole school gets to hear it when it goes wrong and presumably they connect the screw ups with me, the token English teacher. Oh well, what can you do. I have no control over the technical aspects of the broadcast, I'm just there to provide a native speaker voice so I've learnt to just accept the farcical screw ups that happen every week and try to see the funny side.

I'd never even realised that it was possible to do TV broadcasts too until, in my last week of normal classes before school broke up for the winter vacation, I found out that I had to host a short morning program on my school's internal TV channel. I have to admit that I wasn't exactly thrilled at the prospect of being on TV at 8.30am with the prospect of having to overcome all kinds of technical hitches but I suppose that's the price you pay for fame. The program was a chance to showcase some of the best performances from the previous week's English Storytelling and Pop Song Contest. The contest was pretty entertaining. I was one of the three English teachers (the other two were Korean English teachers) who acted as the judging panel. We had to mark each team's performance on fluency, pronunciation and showmanship. We were showered with handfuls of chocolates by kids competing in the contest in an attempt to bribe us which was quite funny. There were about 10 teams who entered from the 1st and 2nd grades and some performed English pop songs while others told stories in English. Most of the students gave really impressive performances with good pronunciation and excellent fluency. Some of them had even made props for their performances which was a nice touch. We even had a seasonal Christmas pop song from one team which was kind of nice considering Christmas isn't really a big deal over here though as I had to listen to it repeatedly the day before at rehearsals I was a bit sick of it by the time of the actual contest. I started thinking to myself that all I really wanted for Christmas was to never hear that bloody Mariah Carey song ever again. Bah humbug!

This girl was the overall winner of the competition. She did an excellent recital of one of Aesop's fables, "The gold ax and the silver ax", complete with handmade props, fake mustaches and different voices!

One of my favourite performances though was one of the worst. Two 2nd grade girls gave a spirited performance, singing some American pop song, but their English was terrible, they were pretty badly out of tune and they didn't seem to know any of the words except for the chorus but they gave it their all and really got into it. One of the girls was even doing some air guitar! However, one of the Korean English teachers wrote on the comments section of her score sheet "They seem to be enjoying themselves" - ouch! That really cracked me up - I must be an evil person!

The winning teams all got cash prizes of varying sizes, 40,000 won for 1st place I think (abut 25 quid), and we thought that was the end of it. But no, next week it turned out that three of the best teams would have to perform on school TV so all their peers could watch them - a terrifying prospect for young teenagers I'm sure. Unsurprisingly, it was difficult to get any volunteers for the TV program as apparently many of the winners were worried that they would get laughed at by their peers for speaking English well. One of my co-teacher told me this bullying of kids with good English skills is quite a big problem in Korean schools but I suppose the same could be said for kids with good French in British schools - I'm sure they would get laughed at or seen as a teacher's pet too. Luckily, one of my colleagues had the stellar idea of persuading the students into doing it by telling them that they would have to give their prizes back if they didn't. This had the desired effect and on a chilly Thursday morning three of the teams gathered in the broadcasting studio and sat around looking fairly petrified while I tried to cheer them up with a bit of clowning around. I was pretty nervous too to be honest but it all went well, no technical hitches for once, and the kids did a great job.

She was really nervous but did a great job singing "Because of You" by Kelly Clarkson - a horrible song in my opinion but, luckily for the competing teams, I wasn't allowed to judge based on whether I liked their song or not!

These three girls did a really nice performance of the fable "The town mouse and the country mouse" and they'd drawn these scenes themselves to illustrate different parts of the story.

The girls standing in front of the camera with the Korean flag just behind them and off to the side a little. The two girls on the sides look pretty nervous but they were fine once they were talking.

Me playing the role of host and trying not to look as foolish as I felt - and failing miserably!

Our cheerful and very professional camera crew! I think they were drawn from the school's broadcasting club.

The best thing of all though, was that this ended up being my last morning broadcast of the year as we didn't have to do one on Friday as that was the last day of term. Hurray - no more rushing to school for Morning Class at least another 3 months!

Thank you for your listening

Recently I spent a fortnight conducting speaking tests at my school, I originally thought great, a whole two weeks when I won't have to do any thing except sit back and listen to the kids speaking. Of course it turned out not to be as easy or fun as that! Within a few hours I was bored stiff of hearing the same stilited answers over and over again or of trying to drag any kind of English at all from a depressingly high number of students.

I'd first done some speaking tests a week or two after we arrived in Korea. I was told there were a few students who had been absent during the previous tests just before I arrived. I was just told to ask them a few questions and then give them a grade from their answers. Having only been teaching for just over a week and not having any idea what they had been asked in the previous test or how they had been marked I was more than a little apprehensive about the whole thing. Luckily the two students I had to test were pretty easy to grade and I gave them both a B.

When it came to organising my own speaking tests 6 months later I got little more guidance in how to arrange the test. I was just asked to put together some questions about the last few chapters and ask each student a selection of three or four of them. I created an unecessarily complex grading system which awarded marks for vocabualry, fluency, grammar and listening then combined them into a A-E grade. In common with most Korean testing the system was heavily weighted towards the top marks and the only way it was possible to score E was not to speak any English at all.

The tests were filled with highs and lows from the depressing moments when I got blank looks to such taxing questions as "How are you?" or "What is your name?" to the highs where I started to get invovled in deep discussions with the more able students. The best fun moments of the tests though were the unintentionally funny answers, a couple of which I had to try hard not to laugh at. Some of the best included: "What is your dream job?" "Chicken" and my personal favorite "What are the paralympic games" "Starcraft?" (A very popular computer game in Korea).

Overall the answers seemed to be a mix between the depressingly bad and impressively good, not many seemed to fall in the middle ground.

Sophie also did speaking tests at her school recently although hers were set up differently to mine. The kids at her school had to prepare a short speech about what they wanted to do on their winter vacation and give 3 reasons (often pronounced "lesions") why they want to do that. And they always, always had to finish it with "Thank you for your listening". That's what they've been instructed to say by their Korean English teachers - head-smackingly frustrating but what can you do. Apparently, it's a bit of a memory test really and in common with my tests it's impossible for the kids to fail. The lowest mark they could get was 16 out of 40 and they only got that if they didn't speak any English at all. Of course most of the kids just stumbled through a short speech about how they wanted to visit their grandmother's house for winter vacation because "grandmother is funny", "I can play computer games" and "grandmother gives me many money'. Failing that, their reasons might be "my grandparents have more TVs than in my house" or on a nicer note "I want to see my cousins and play snowball fight with them". So most of the answers were pretty basic and places they wanted to go varied from grandmother's house to Everland (a big Korean theme park near to where we live) to going abroad so that they could experience flying on a plane for the first time.

There were a few funny and more detailed answers though including the girl who wanted to go to France to see all the handsome French boys and to eat lots of brad and the boy who said he wanted to go to Afghanistan for his winter vacation so he could "join the Taliban, help Afghan children and shoot the gun". The most disturbing answer that Sophie got for her speaking tests was the boy who said that he wanted to visit a "war place" for his winter vacation because:

1. I want to die, because I wouldn't live in this world.
2. I want to kill people because I'm stressful about person.
3. I want to shoot the gun to people, I'm good at it!

Unsurprisingly, Sophie was a bit worried by this and spoke to the boy's co-teacher about it though apparently she did given him a good mark as she doesn't want to be a target when he goes on his murderous rampage. Sophie also had one opinionated answer in a speaking test - a rare thing in Korea! The boy said his 3 reasons for wanting to visit Sapporro, Japan were:

1. The snow in Sapporro is beautiful.
2. There's a snow festival in Sapporro
3. Japan attacked Korea many times in the past so many Koreans hate Japan. But this is the 21st century and Japan and Korea must help each other so he wants to visit Japan to find out more.

It's nice to hear someone in Korea being positive about Japan. There is a long history of conflict between the two countries and many people in Korea are understandably upset with Japan's conduct during the years when they occupied Korea but clearly the times are a-changing.

Sophie did a full round of speaking tests back in the summer too that were set up the same as the winter ones. For the summer tests, her students had to talk about their dream job and give 3 reasons for why they wanted to do it. The most popular jobs included doctor, dentist, teacher and cook. There were a few more interesting occupations cited though including baker, geneticist, political journalist, interpreter and a couple of kids who wanted to be diplomats. Sophie said it was a shame she couldn't give the students extra points for originality.

Most of the students said they wanted their dream job because they wanted to make a lot of money or because they wanted to help sick people or support their parents or more amusingly because their parents wanted them to do it. One kid said he anted to be a doctor so he could help poor people and by helping them he may allow them to know the love of Jesus! Another girl said she wanted to be "a good mom" when she grew up so she could "make babies and babies have to obey me"! She had her priorities sorted out by the sounds of it!

Thank you for your reading!

School Festival 2010

The second of the two days of fun (and no work!) at my school was the School Festival. This was even more exciting than the sports day which had been day one of my school's extravaganza. It was a day of singing, dancing, silly games and even a Chinese acrobatic show that showcased the talents of our school's students and some of the teachers too. The festival opened with a performance of traditional Korean samul nori drumming by some of the students followed by the usual round of speeches by the Principal and other school worthies.

Students giving a samul nori performance at the opening of the school festival.

The school principal addresses the crowd.

With the opening niceties dispensed with, we moved onto the first entertainment of the day - the O and X game. This was basically an elimination game that was played outside on the school playing field and involved the competing students being asked true or false questions. They had to decide if they thought it was true (O) or false (X) and move to the appropriate side of the field for their answer. The last person left after the various rounds won some kind of prize. I actually had a part in this competition as on e of the rounds was a special English quiz. I has to get up on stage and ask them 3 true or false questions though I don't think they were hard enough as everyone went the right way for all 3! Oh well, never mind, perhaps being a quizmaster isn't my calling in life after all.

My 5 mins of infamy. I was actually quite nervous, worried perhaps that they wouldn't understand a word I said and I would look like a total fool.

Students playing the O and X game on the dirt playing field in front of the school. Teachers held up ropes after a set amount of time and if you were in the wrong box you were out.

These were the prizes on offer to the winners of the pop song contest and the other competitive events at the festival.

After I had done my 5 mins of work for the day I went for a wander around the school playing field to have a look at the stalls that had been set up all round the edges. Some stalls were being run by parents but most were run by students. A few of them were selling food and drinks whilst the majority were game stalls reminiscent of the kind of thing you might see at a village fête but with a distinctly Korean twist. You were supposed to buy tokens to play the games but I didn't realise and didn't have any money on me. Luckily, the novelty of having a Foreign English teacher play your games seemed to be enough for me to get quite a few freebies!

This was a hot food stall run by parents. It was selling curled fish paste on sticks (not my favourite!), Korean "pizza" (pancakes) and tteokbokki (spicy rice cake stew). They gave me some for free which was great as I was freezing and it was tasty and hot!

A student run food stall selling weird but strangely delicious rectangular shaped hot dog sausages.

These girls had made a lucky wheel game for their stall and they let me have a free go. I won a pair of small pink socks which was cool!

One stall I visited was selling anything - they just wanted you to try their "special" biscuits. The biscuits had wasabi as well as custard cream in the middle and were pretty damn hot but as I love wasabi I happily munched my way through a couple, all the while exclaiming about how delicious they were much to the disbelief of the students!

A student run face painting stall. Their face painting skills were a little hit and miss but that just added to the fun.

This lad wasn't selling anything. All he wanted was a hug! That's what he charged me for this photo - 1 hug! I'm sure teachers would never be able to that in the UK.

They're playing Chinese chess? This seemed to be a popular spectator sport too which isn't surprising given that there appears to be a whole TV channel dedicated to the board game Go on Korean TV.

This was by far my favourite game stall at the festival. It's basically a human sized version of the whack a mole game with students instead of moles and inflatable rubber rings instead of holes. Genius!

This game was so funny I had to stick an extra picture on here of it. This is a closer view of the hammer action. Th students were really going for it with the mallets but the "moles" weren't put off, and kept sticking their heads up through the rings for my punishment.

At this stall you got to throw water balloons at a few brave (and very cold) students. Note the towels stuffed under their chins in an attempt to stop them getting too wet.

This was probably the most dangerous stall at the festival. The object of the game was to burst the balloon in the open locker. Players were offered the choice of using sharp stones, scissors or screwdrivers which they then had to throw at the lockers in the hope of popping that balloon. Ricochets were scarily common!

A student takes aim with a pair of scissors. There are small sharp stones and other scary implements on the chair in front of him in case he finds that the scissors aren't cutting it.

Inside the school, there was a big display of the student's craft and artwork including a few posters warning of the dangrs of smoking and drink driving.

Yep, smokers really are a pain the neck, aren't they?

The stalls were all cleared away at the end of the morning and the afternoon was given over to the song contest. I must admit that I missed a lot of it as I hid inside where it was warm but I did catch a few bits, including a storming performance by an all teacher rock super-group, a few songs performed by students replete with full on K-Pop style dance moves and the only rap performance of the festival by a couple of students who rapped such charming English lyrics as "I'm a fucking soldier" and "Motherfuckers come on" whilst the Principal watched, nodding his head appreciatively (presumably with no idea what the words meant). The festival closed with a special performance by a Chinese acrobatic troupe who did some amazing tricks.

Some of the students show off their moves in the pop song contest.

Our resident rappers - they're "fuckin' soldiers" apparently - well I'm sure they will be in a few years when they have do to their national service!

The Chinese acrobats were amazing.

This female acrobat could even spring down flights of stairs slinky style without losing her composure thanks to her steel hula hoops.

Mind-bendingly flexible female acrobats.

The acrobat show finale.

It was a really fun couple of days and I was pretty sad when they were over, especially as I had to go back to doing some real work.