Day 6
BOOM! POW! BOING! Thursday exploded into the week as we taught the
students about action verbs. We used games, writing drills, and our reading to
show the students how language grippes our attention through word choice.
Beginning with a human obstacle course, a student navigated a blindfolded
classmate in, around, and through different obstacles set up in the classroom
by the other students. Reading about the final run from the lion in The Horse
and His Boy, intense action came alive as we saw the use of action verbs to
captivate the audience. The students practiced this in their writing activity.
My favorite part of the lesson came after lunch. The class explored the
complexity of language using Hank Green’s “I Know” and then I challenged them
with a scavenger hunt. My teaching partner took clues like “I get bigger when I
eat, but die weaker when I drink” and scattered them around the campground. I
started the students off with the first clue. They read it, and discussed what
location at camp it was a clue for. Once they figured it out, we were off to
look at that location for the next clue. We wandered back and forth, up and
down the stares, inside and outside. After completing the ten clues, we sat in
the playground and talked. We taught the students some English tongue twisters
and they told us a few Czech ones. Everyone ended the class with a happy smile.
That afternoon, I participated in the afternoon activity. The Czech
team prepared a Live Action Role Play (LARP) game for the teams. I remembered
hearing about the LARP from two years ago, when the students ran from orcs,
fought with bows, arrows and swords, escaped by boat, and ended with a trust
fall. This year, the LARP’s name was “Escape From Work Camp.” Despite the
planners best efforts distance this from some sort of concentration camp game,
the temptation to make that assumption snared quite a few of us. Mostly, we
role played some menial tasks that exemplify the life and times of a prisoner.
Then, our team escaped and ran through the woods to freedom. While in the
woods, we faced many challenges of a ropes course nature. And after learning to
work together in freedom as we did in slavery, we took our revenge and attacked
the guards that had held us captive. We attacked with chalk canons and defeated
the Hitler, uh…I mean, the evil leader. We feasted on the spoils of war…well,
we had ordered pizza and so had a welcome relief to the camp food. 
One of the videos from class, we just watched the song. We also watched this:
Comments
Post a Comment