Our Christmas class

So every year we try to do something fun with the kids before Christmas. This year we decided to get my family involved and asked my nieces and nephews back home to send my students a video message. Just something short about themselves.

We then showed the messages to my students and allowed them to respond in whatever way they wanted. The results were so wonderful, we have some amazing videos, cards, mini presentations about Korean food and some origami.

Everyone involved had a lot of fun. My students loved seeing my family back home and were so excited when I told them that I would send all of their cards back to Ireland.

I absolutely love doing these fun activities with my kids, it allows the lower level students to express themselves in other forms and it allows my higher level students to show off their English skills.

Here is a collection of some of the cards, videos and other miscellaneous materials that we made:

6th Grades Christmas messages to my family.

Merry Christmas!

Day trip to Jeonju

Every year around this time the program that we teach for (GNET) take all of the teachers in the program for a day trip. I usually enjoy them as it gives me a chance to catch up with people and make some new friends. Last year we went to Haeinsa and it was such a beautiful area. This year we were told that we would be going to Jeonju.

Our bus left at 8 a.m. as it's a three hour drive from Gimhae to Jeonju. Our first stop was at an apple orchard to do some apple picking. It was in a gorgeous countryside area and the farmer had the sweetest little dog that we got to play with for a while.
I picked a few apples but we all managed to keep about 15 apples each (I'm sure there'll be a lot of apple crumbles being made this weekend in Gimhae!)

Myself and Jason on the bus bright and early.

The incredible views from the orchard.

The apple orchard.

One of the many apples that we picked

The adorable dog at the farm.

My lovely friend Ian took this photo.

After our apple picking it was time to drive in to Jeonju city and have some lunch. Jeonju is famous throughout Korea for having amazing food, especially bibimbap. After our bus getting stuck after going down a one way street we finally arrived at the restaurant. I'm not a huge fan of bibimbap (I have this weird thing where I hate mixing all of my foods together and that's exactly what bibimbap is) But we also got some paejeon which was the best I've ever had! Paejeon is a Korean style pancake made with lots of spring onions and usually squid too. It's really delicious!

Some of the GNETs enjoying our lunch.

After lunch we had 2 hours free time to explore the city. Jeonju has a big historical center right in the middle of the city where every building is traditional style. They had beautiful little stores and restaurants and a huge park with temples inside. After going to see the temples and the beautiful Autumn coloured trees surrounding them we decided to relax at a little coffee shop and people watch for a bit. Afterwards we got some delicious ice cream and wandered in and out of the shops.

The entrance to a small bamboo forest.

Autumn is well and truly here...and I love it!

The beautiful temple area of Jeonju...I just love those beautiful trees!

Then before we knew it it was time to head back to Gimhae. This was my first time visiting Jeonju and I'd 100% recommend visiting it to anyone that is visiting Korea. I'm sure that we were lucky that we went on a weekday because there were still tourists around...I can't imagine what it's like on weekends! But regardless, a part of me wishes that I lived there.

Myself and my good friend Ane standing in front of a 500 year old tree.

Teaching through pop music

Sorry, I've had this post written for months but had to wait to get the video before posting.

July is always a strange time of the year in the Korean classroom. Usually the end of semester exams take place at the beginning of the month which leaves us with about 3 weeks of no textbook.

Usually this is the time to watch movies with the students or play games but this time around myself and my co-teacher decided to do things differently. Last year I had a small after school class and I would teach them English pop songs so I decided to do this with my 5th and 6th graders during July. It took up 2 class periods which is a week of lessons for me. We chose the song "Baby" by Justin Bieber as many of my students had heard the song before and it's not too difficult to learn. For our first class I printed the lyrics out but left some blanks on the page. We listened to the song and then I asked them some questions (before giving them the handout) One question was "how many times does Justin say the word baby?" It was quite fun to see the concentration on their faces (the answer is 56 times by the way)

Then they had to fill in the missing song words. We gave them the first letter to each word and then one or two other letters to help them with the spelling. All of the students seemed very engaged, even the low level students who were able to figure out most of the words. When we finished we reviewed the words and spelled them out, then there was only enough time to sing the song one more time.

The next class was quite fun for everyone. My co-teacher had a great idea to make a music video with our students so I printed out the song lyrics sentence by sentence. Each student was given one sentence and they had to write that sentence with a nice picture. If they didn't understand what the sentence meant I would try to act it out for them so that they would understand.

I always love doing creative things in the classroom (even though I'm the most uncreative person in the world!) as it allows the low level students to relax and enjoy themselves. My students were so in to the drawing that it took them the entire 40 minute period to finish. Once finished my co-teacher took photos of them with their lyrics. My co-teacher then turned it in to a music video for each class. I feel so lucky to have such an amazing co-teacher. She cares about the students so much and uses her free time to teach the low level students. I've learned so much from her and she makes me want to be a better teacher everyday

It was a really fun way to spend my last week before camp and vacation. I got to hang out with the kids and chat with them while they were drawing and once they found out that I was getting married during the vacation they were so excited and there was a constant "congratulations" coming from all around the classroom.

Our summer camp is going to have a "colour" theme this time around so we are going to do lots of creative things. I'm pretty excited to show my students the joys of food colouring! 

Summer Camp 2014

Excited by the crazy colours!

At the end of both of the semesters us English teachers teach an English camp for any students that are interested. I teach camp in both of my schools for 3 days. Some people don't like it but I've always loved camp because I usually have complete control over the camp and it allows me to get to know a few of my students a lot better in that short time.

I always give my camps a theme, some themes I've used before were "Harry Potter camp" and "Pirates Camp". This year I wanted to try a cooking camp as other teachers have had a lot of fun doing this and my mom had sent me some food colouring from Ireland that I wanted to use with my students. So I initially started planning a cooking camp but then the more that myself and my co-teacher were looking up about food colouring we realised that we could nearly do our entire camp around food colouring so we changed the name of the camp to "Colours Camp".

One of my kids wonderful creations!

Here is a quick summary of our camp:

Day 1:

1st period: Introductions and worksheet
2nd and 3rd periods: Soap Making
4th period: Ice cream making

Day 2:
1st and 2nd period: Make coloured spaghetti
3rd and 4th period: Make marshmallow men

Day 3: (My co-teacher did this day by herself as I had to catch my flight to Ireland)
1st period: Toast painting
2nd period
3rd and 4th period: water balloon fight


The students had a lot of fun making the soap and it was surprisingly easy to do! My co-teacher had a soap making kit and they turned out really beautiful and smelled so good too!

Min Woo very happy while making soap

The final result

Some of the girls with their soaps.

After making our soap we began to make home-made ice-cream. This was very easy to do also. You just need a lot of ice, salt and flavoured milk. You put the ice and salt in to a big ziplock bag, then put the flavoured milk into a smaller ziplock bag (making sure that it's closed properly) You then place the milk bag in to the ice and salt bag and shake vigorously for 5 to 10 minutes constantly. We put the students in to pairs so that they could take turns shaking as the ice was pretty cold on your hands after a while (I'd definitely recommend asking your kids to bring gloves in to school for this activity). We had about a 70% success rate and the kids who didn't manage to turn theirs to ice-cream still had a nice milkshake to drink.

Teamwork while shaking the ice-cream bags.

The finished result...it was delicious!

Day two was a fun day. We began by making coloured spaghetti. It was really easy to do and the kids found the colour of the spaghetti quite crazy! First we just boiled the spaghetti as normal, when cooked we drained it and washed it with some cold water to cool it down. We then prepared ziplock bags with the different coloured food colouring in them and put some spaghetti in to each bag. We mixed them for a couple of minutes and then rinsed it one more time. The colours were really cool and we cooked a sauce afterwards so that they could eat the spaghetti.

Some of the spaghetti.

Unfortunately at my city school some of the colouring fell on the ground so we ran out of the ordinary colouring for one team and they had to use one of our flavoured colours. So they ended up with banana flavoured spaghetti, it was, well...interesting.

The yellow one was actually banana flavour.

After eating and cleaning we were on to my final activity for camp, marshmallow people.

One of the great marshmallow men!

We had different types of marshmallows for the kids and it was so simple. We had the flavoured food colouring and they used paintbrushes to make some cool marshmallow people. I then mixed some icing with the different colours to make some hair for their marshmallows. As you can see from the photos I have some very creative kids!

This marshmallow got shot.

And then it was time for me to go to Ireland and get married :)

My wonderful co-teachers and some of the teachers that come to my English teachers class got me this beautiful necklace as a wedding present!

June in Korea.

My beautiful home.

Life has been moving quite quickly this last month. I've been pretty busy so haven't had a chance to update. June is always a really busy time for English teachers in Elementary schools here in Gimhae as it's time for the English speech contest. Every school in the city enters a child from each grade (3rd-6th) in to the contest where they will be asked a few questions about themselves and then get asked to describe a picture. I was helping my kids after school most days on the run up to the event but unfortunately none of them placed.

Some of my students before taking a road cycling test.

Other than that myself Jason and some of our friends have been trying hard to lose some weight so we've been doing a lot more cycling, hiking and healthy eating. We also managed to fit in one more camping trip before the rainy season got here and that trip was amazing!

Jason and Ian on one of our bike rides.

Jason on the bike path.

One of our hikes.

The view out to Jangyu.

This time we went with our friend Ian , and some other friends. Our friend Derek also brought his gorgeous golden retriever so it was great for Willy to finally spend some time with a dog that is bigger than him!
We were camping on a beautiful sand bank next to a river near Hadong. The weather was absolutely perfect for us and it was such a fun relaxing weekend. The fact that Ian is a great cook and brought some amazing food really helped matters too!

Our amazing campsite.

Too beautiful!

Our campsite.

Our tent.

The beautiful view from our tent.

and again.

Willy and his new friend Plato.

Grumpy puppy sitting by the bonfire.

The bonfire.

Good times!

We also headed to Songjeong beach in Busan for a day and it was also great fun. Songjeong doesn't have a subway nearby so it doesn't get too busy compared to Haeundae or Gwangali beaches. This was my first time in Songjeong and I really liked it, the water was nice and there were some really great restaurants nearby. Unfortunately, that Friday I had gotten my wisdom tooth removed and it was still pretty painful so I didn't get to really enjoy the great food that we had. Before heading home we stopped off at a restaurant that Ian had been to before and loved. The second that we saw it we understood why. It's a small surfers restaurant/hostel and the food was unbelievably good. The music and the vibe were equally as good, so we'll definitely be heading back there sometime once the rainy season finishes!

Grabbing some lunch in Songjeong

Willys "please give me your food" look.

Jason and Ian on the beach.

Even though it looks cloudy, it was actually a really nice day.

We have really appreciated buying our car during this time of year as already we've had so many adventures that we never would have had without it...and the best part is that Willy gets to come along on all of our adventures with us and just like most dogs he loves sticking his head out the window!

We've also been pretty busy finalising our plans for our legal ceremony in Ireland this summer. Ian made up some beautiful invitations for us and as the time gets closer we are both getting excited about it and can't believe that we are soon going to be husband and wife!

Our invitations all ready to be sent.

But now the rainy season has begun which means more rain and clouds than sun for the next couple of weeks. But it also brings a bit of coolness to the air. This past weekend we met our friends Derek, Amy and Matt up by a waterfall near our town. It was raining but that didn't stop the guys and the dogs from getting into the creek and enjoying the water. Willy is getting so much more confident in the water as time goes on!

The waterfall in Jangyu.

The majestic Plato had the time of his life swimming.

We are off to Ireland in three weeks time and I can't wait to update you all on the little adventures we'll be taking while there.