Volunteering Opportunities in Korea

A great thing about our exchange program was that they had internships and volunteering opportunities for students. One of the opportunities that we've mentioned in a previous post was volunteering to teach English at a middle school. Initially we had planned to only teach for a semester, but we loved it so much that we decided to do it for the year. Although it was intimidating at first, but by the end of the year we became a lot more confident and we learned a lot from our students. This was definitely one of our most favorite times in Korea. We taught English to a 3rd year class and most of them were already fluent in English so our goal was to challenge them and encourage them to improve their speaking skills. Since it was our first year teaching we did a lot of trial and error and we spent a lot of time preparing lesson plans. Rather than making them learn from a book we challenged them with a variety of activities that kept them engaged such as spelling bees, critical thinking games, speaking games and so on. Overall it was one of the most rewarding experiences and we really recommend other students studying abroad to volunteer and take advantage of opportunities offered to them. This opportunity made us want to possibly pursue a teaching career in the future and having obtained a year experience under our belt will really benefit us in the future.

Some of our students playing a Jenga english game that consisted of  various challenges on the blocks! 

Pizza party on the last day of class ! 

Midterms and Volunteering

It's Spring in Korea and you know what that means! CHERRY BLOSSOMS and most importantly.... MIDTERMS.

It's been difficult to update recently and we wish we had more time to update, but for the past week we have been preparing for midterms! Midterms are always a stressful, but here in South Korea students start preparing weeks before and spend their nights in the library getting little sleep. It's amazing to see how dedicated Korean students are! We've seen so many students holding all night study group sessions all around campus. They practically live in the library! Luckily for us, some of our professors decided midterms weren't necessary and so we only have a few, but we've run into some difficulties. The difficulties of living in a country where English is not their first language.

 While all our classes are held in English it does not necessarily mean our professors speak perfect English, in fact some may speak very little while others speak it well and others are in between. At times some of our professors choose to switch from English to Korean, but I believe this happens in many countries. The problem with this and at least for us at the moment is that sometimes we get lost in translation. For us at least it has led to more stress. Sometimes it is difficult to understand what our professors are trying to convey and  we just simply can't understand their questions. This is definitely the case at the moment, but aside from that we also have news to share ! We recently volunteered to teach English to Middle school children!

Last week we met with the staff and tomorrow (Monday) we will begin teaching! We're definitely nervous, but also really excited for this experience. When we met with the middle school staff we also met some of the children participating in the program. We were told that the kids were really looking forward to the program and when we met them we realized it was true! Many of them we're yelling "TEACHER, HI ! IT'S SO NICE TO MEET YOU! YOU'RE SO PRETTY!"  This definitely made us less nervous, but now we're working on our lesson plans for tomorrow and we will definitely keep you updated on our teaching!

We have so much to share from the past weeks so when things calm down and go back to normal we will upload pictures of all our recent adventures and focus on making posts about our daily life in Korea, such as places to eat, the night life in Korea, as well as dating in Korea and our experiences! We''ll leave you with a few pictures we've taken of the Cherry blossom trees on campus !

There are so many cherry blossom trees around campus!

There's a forest on our campus right next to our dorms! We go through it every morning to get to class!