A working weekend

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Another weekend and yet another English camp..

This time it wasn’t for our school but was held at our school. About 400 students from another province descended on our school for the weekend for an English, science and maths camp and we were in charge of the English part.

Luckily we only had to work the one day on the Saturday but it was a looong day! We were collected at 7am and didn’t get home until nearly midnight. We got to the school just in time for a lovely breakfast (rice!) and then went to set up our activities. I was working with my friend Gab and we were playing chines whisper races and duck duck goose with the kids. It was okay at first and it might seem like easy work but when you have to explain and play these games over and over with 18 groups of students, the same things over and over again and keep enthusiastic it can get pretty boring! We had a lunch break with plenty of rice before the rest of the groups came around.

Luckily we had some free time during the day as some groups run over and in this time we were entertained by our 1/5 students. As the school is a boarding school a lot of the kids were still around for the weekend and were helping out around the school. We were using 1/5s classroom so the girls were in and out, watching what was going on and when we weren’t busy wanting to play games.

They are a really sweet bunch of girls and we had a right laugh with them. It was nice to be able to interact with them outside of the classroom environment as they are quite a big class and so we don’t get much time to speak to them individually. We played what’s the time mister wolf with them, musical chairs, we played spice girls and taught them the dance to stop right now and played harry potter which involved running around the classroom with a broom (for some reason in Thailand every classroom seems to have at least 10 brooms!). Then the girls taught us a Thai dance and got us to play zombies with them, but my highlight of the day was playing with an old mattress that just happened to be lying around school.

(It is not uncommon for mattresses, duvets and pillows to be found in the classroom or scattered around the corridors, sometimes when the school has visitors the students will sleep in the classrooms instead of the dormitory’s. Just another thing that would only ever happen in Thailand!).

So we spent ages pulling each other around on the mattress, its quite funny the fun you can have with an old mattress. We took it in turns to sit on it while people ran with it down the corridor. We had great fun!

Then we went for a rice packed dinner but luckily I had brought a packet of maltesers with me so I ate them to prevent a rice overload. We had a few free hours in the evening so I caught up on a lot of marking and filled in all of my grade books and then at 7pm we headed over to the big hall for the evenings entertainment.

The kids all put on a show, they were in groups and each group did a dance, some kids sung and played music, then at 10pm we all had free dance where the schools rock band came on and performed. You literally would have thought that Justin Bieber himself had just walked into the school hall, I had never heard anything like it. This was just a few of the lads from the school playing on the guitar and drums and singing but the kids all went wild, they were screaming and jumping up and down like it was some massive gig. It was definitely an experience!

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