English Camp Activities

An English camp is a single day given over to using the language rather than studying it. The children are in mixed groups, they move between short activity sessions, and almost everything is spoken. It is not a lesson in a field: it is a day built so that a child who never speaks in class finds themselves speaking for four hours without noticing.

That is also why it works for the pupils who are furthest behind. In an ordinary period the same confident dozen answer everything. In a camp, the group cannot complete the activity unless everybody in it says something, so the quiet children are carried into speaking by the task rather than by the teacher.

The Central Province guide below sets out a full day, and the shape is worth knowing before you read it - most of the work is in the first forty-five minutes, before a single activity begins.

• Registration, then the oath. The oath matters more than it sounds. The children promise to join in, to collaborate and to enjoy it, and having said so out loud they behave differently for the rest of the day.
• Grouping, then the ground rules. The groups are mixed on purpose, and the rules are agreed with the children rather than announced at them. Safety first, listen, take part, share, be polite, have fun - and speak.
• Warm-up activities, then the sessions. Short, physical, and noisy enough that the quiet children stop being conspicuous.
• Five activity sessions with a tea break after the second. Each one in the guide gives the materials needed and the procedure, so another teacher can run it without you.
• A common wind-up session and a group cheer. Ending together matters: a camp that simply stops leaves the day feeling like an interrupted lesson.

The guide gives the programme. These are the practical things that decide whether the day works, and they are the parts usually learned the hard way.

• Mix the groups across classes and grades. A group of friends from one class will speak Sinhala or Tamil to each other all day. A group of strangers has to use the language they have in common, which is the one you want.
• Give every group a name and a cheer in the first ten minutes. It sounds trivial. It is the single cheapest thing you can do to make a group of strangers behave like a team.
• One teacher stays with a group; one teacher stays with a station. Decide which model you are using before the day. Mixing the two is how children end up unsupervised between sessions.
• Plan the tea break like a session. It is the point at which a badly organised camp falls apart, and forty-five children with nothing to do for twenty minutes is not a break, it is a risk.
• Have a wet-weather version of every outdoor activity. Write it down beforehand. Deciding in the rain, with the children already outside, never goes well.
• Tell the parents what it is. A letter saying the children will be at school for a day of English activities, with the times and what to bring, prevents most of the misunderstandings a camp generates.

Permission, supervision and safety are the school's responsibility and they are not covered by any activity guide. Settle them in writing before you plan a single session.

• Written permission from the principal, and whatever your zonal or provincial office requires. Ask rather than assume - requirements differ between zones.
• Parental consent in writing for every child, kept by the school, especially if any part of the day is away from the school premises.
• A named teacher responsible for first aid, and a note of who to telephone for each child. One person, named, not everybody vaguely.
• A head count at every transition, and a written list of which child is in which group. This is the whole of camp safety in one line.
• Drinking water for a day of talking outdoors. Children will not ask, and a hot day plus four hours of shouting is exactly how a camp ends early.