SU 10th Annual High School English Camp
Sapporo University held its 10th Annual High School English Camp on Saturday, July 25 to Sunday, July 26. This year’s English Camp participants included 42 students (23 first year, 15 second year and four third year students) from 15 different high schools – seven from Sapporo and eight from other cities in Hokkaido, including Ebetsu, Furano, Date, Niseko, Noboribetsu, and Tomakomai.
The High School English Camp is the brainchild of Prof. Alan Bossaer. The main purpose of the camp is to promote Sapporo University in general and the English major in particular. Six part-time instructors and several student assistants helped with this year’s English Camp.
Students checked in on Saturday morning and English lessons began from 10:00 a.m. until about 5:00 p.m. There was a one-hour lunch break at noon. The lessons on the first day had students create their own country, including the county’s population and a flag, and place their country on a world map and make PowerPoint slides for a presentation of their country.
The students had to include five landscape features for their country. They had to find five pictures on the Internet and use five different adjectives, but they were not allowed to use the adjectives beautiful or nice. Students did a Google search by typing, for example, “spectacular mountain pictures” and then copying and pasting a picture they liked onto a slide.
Next, students had to think of five unusual things to do in their country and describe them using five different verbs. Again, using Google search, students typed “crazy activities pictures” in their search and then copied and pasted the pictures onto slides.
Once students had finished making their PowerPoint slides they applied the vocabulary and grammar they learned by giving presentations to several classmates using a template, and then by using a role-play template to practice the information as a conversation.
Finally, students had conversations describing their hometowns in the same style as the conversation template.
On Saturday evening there was a barbeque dinner at the SU Seminar House, where students also spent the night. There are enough beds at the Seminar House for about 60 people and there are shower rooms on both the first and second floors.
On Sunday, lessons started at 10:00 a.m. after breakfast in the cafeteria. The theme for Sunday was work. The students were divided into groups with three to four students in each group.
Each group had to create their own company and think of a company name and logo, location, starting and finishing time, a job description, salary, overtime, work responsibilities and good and bad points about the job.
Besides creating a company, they also had to remember the details of their company and interview or be interviewed by students from four other companies. After the interviews, the students returned to their group and shared information about the good and bad points of all the companies they interviewed.
Then they decided which company would be the best to work for and voted for the most popular company. At the end of the lesson students were given prizes based on most popular company as well as the most creative or original company logo.
The lessons finished at noon and there was a pizza lunch from 12:30 p.m. to 1:15 p.m. The winners were announced after lunch and prizes were handed out. The camp concluded at 3:00 p.m. with a ceremony at the Sapporo University Inter-Cultural Center (SUICC).