Alison's Reflection During the Language Camp B

This was my first time in joining a language camp and truthfully, I was anticipated in it. I used to teach in a classroom but in language camp, the students can learn in a free and unrestrained way. I used to have otherwise-minded thoughts on language camp but then, after having an immense thought, language camp acts as a crucial role in enhancing students’ interest in language learning and it gives more space to the students to have their own authentic learning compare to dull and boring lesson in school.

During the camp, I was assigned to be the facilitator of Group “Harry Potter” as the students were all divided into different groups of Super Heroes. The members in my group were all come from different school but in same level of Form 2. From what I have observed, the girls in my group were more active in learning whereas the boys were came to the camp to have some fun with their friends as they were not concern on the activities and they tended to chat with their friends from other groups than discussing their tasks with their group members. In short, the girls were the active learners and the boys were passive in learning.

At first, they seemed to be not interested to the activities in the camp. They did not show significant interest in the Charades and also the Win, Lose or Draw. Most probably they were not familiar with each another yet and both of the games were kind of demotivated once they knew there will be no prizes given for the winning team. Well, they started to bond as a team for the Group Logo and Cheers session while they have to work together in order to create their own logo and cheers. Their passion in ideas finding and giving out their opinion did made me have the faith that they were meant to be here for learning and to be more stand out compared to the other groups.

 As it was a language camp so the main aim of the camp is English learning. In the tandem writing part, the students were required to take turns in writing different version of story based on different theme set and for my group, they were required to write stories about animals. The idea of this activity is to produce different versions of story with different perspective of students as each of them were have to write one sentence for each of the different version of story hence ended up each of them had to write 1 sentence in each of the 6 different stories (total 6 sentences). It was a disaster at first that different students have different proficiency level as some of them were not able to write a structured sentence and thus, we did not manage to get a full and proper story to be presented for the Skit competition. However, they finally came out with a creative and funny story by editing one of the stories written by having a group discussion. Their passion to get good scores in the skit competition motivated them to be creative and innovative and finally they got the Second Place for the competition. A tiring but yet a fruitful one!!!