English Camp Lessons Site Info

This site contains lessons for use in five-day English Camp settings.

Use the buttons at the top to move between the main pages.

The Fruitful button takes you to the Summary Page for this year’s curriculum: Fruitful.

The Fruitful page is your Table of Contents for the week. It shows which ‘fruit’ will be covered each day, as well as the Truth and Verse(s) for each day and links to the Lessons. (See below for tips on teaching English Camp Classes.)

The Worksheets page contains a collection of worksheets, activity pages, and coloring pages for use during Bible or English time. Worksheets are not usually tied to a specific Bible lesson. They can be used as you see fit. Everything is formatted for printing and provided in PDF format.

The Games page contains group games and activities that can help students and leaders get to know each other better and improve their conversational English Skills. Games are not usually tied to a specific English lesson. They can be used as you see fit.

The Songs page contains an embedded website that tracks song lists from various locations and years of English Camp. Current year lists include links to Lyric Videos and Motion Videos, if available.

The Videos page contains an embedded website with links to a collection of short videos for kids that explain the Fruit of the Spirit.

All materials on this site are provided for your use free of charge.

If you have questions/suggestions/comments you’d like to share, email gil@englishcamplessons.com.

Tips for Teaching English Camp Classes

If you’ve ever taught a Sunday School class, VBS class, Kids or Youth Bible Study, etc., you’ll do fine at English Camp. There are some differences you’ll want to prepare for, though. Keep these things in mind during your lesson preparation time and while you are teaching:

Be Prepared

Read through each lesson several times before English Camp. Be familiar with the material. Memorize the verses. The better you know the material, the more comfortable you’ll be in presenting it. That’s true for any teaching/learning environment, but it’s critical for English Camp, because you won’t just be teaching the material: you’ll be hearing it translated into another language, you’ll take questions in another language translated back to you, you’ll take detours to explain points in ways you didn’t plan on, and so on.

If you don’t have the basic foundation of each lesson quite solid in your head and heart before you go, you’ll find it much more difficult to do everything else—including the recommendations below.

Important Bible Recommendations: If you have a smartphone and you don’t already have a Bible app installed on it, the app ‘Bible’ by Life.Church is excellent. It’s free, easy to use, and gives you access to hundreds of translations and paraphrases of the Bible in many languages.

The ERV is great for English Camp use. It’s an ‘Easy-to-read’ Bible in English for younger folks or those who are new to English.
The ESV is also great, and is used often in this curriculum for verse(s) of the day, etc.
The RÚF is the Revised Hungarian Bible used in most Protestant churches in Hungary. This is the Bible given to the kids at English Camps in Hungary and it’s probably the version used by your translators when they look something up in their Bible. (You won’t see it in your Bible app if you search for ‘RUF’ because of the accent over the U. If you want it on your phone, search for ‘Hungarian’ in the Bible app and find RÚF in the list of Hungarian versions.)

Be Translatable

Your students will already have a fairly good grasp of English, but many of them have not have had much opportunity to use it interactively. They will probably know more about the mechanics of English than you expect, but they may not have a lot of confidence using English conversationally. They will have seen a lot of English media content (films, series, short videos on social media, etc.)—but sitting in a class where a native English-speaker expects them to speak English may be a little scary. Plus, every student in your class may have a completely different level of comfort with English.

Your fearless translators will bridge the gaps and keep the class flowing, but you’ll want to do everything you can to make their job as easy as possible. When your translators can smoothly process information in both directions between you and your students, everyone wins.

Tips for working with translators:

Keep it simple. Avoid complex language, fancy words, run-on sentences, words we haven’t used in English since 1611, etc.
Speak in ‘chunks’. Say a sentence. Let it be translated. Repeat. If you normally speak in longer sentences, like this one, train yourself to use shorter sentences while you’re teaching at English Camp.
Confirm understanding. It’s okay to stop often and ask if everyone is understanding what’s being covered.
Expect interruptions. Let your translators know it’s okay for them to ask you to pause so they can answer a student’s question in their own language.
Expect repetition. Your translator may ask you to repeat or rephrase something so they can understand it fully before translating it to the students. Let your translators know that you’re happy to do that and that you appreciate them ensuring everyone’s understanding.
Expect and encourage questions. Ask your translators to let the students know that they can ask questions. It’s wonderful when the students ask questions in English, but there will be times when students can only express questions or thoughts in their own language. Be sure they know that the translator is not just there to translate what the teacher says, but as a resource for everyone.
Rotate translation duties (if possible). Translation is difficult! It’s mentally and physically exhausting. Translating two languages back and forth between a dozen people for 45 minutes makes you feel like you just ran several miles, forgot to eat breakfast, and you need an immediate nap (or two). If your class is blessed with multiple translators, don’t let one of them do all of the work. Ask one to help with the lesson, ask another to help with a game, ask another to help with the conversational parts, etc.

One more important note about translators: Translators are far more than talented individuals who convert your speech into language your students can understand (and vice versa). They are also serve as ‘cultural safety nets’. Let your translators know that you fully expect to say things at times that won’t make sense in their culture. The words might make sense, and they might be translatable, but the way it’s being presented might cause something to be ‘taken the wrong way’ in the culture of your students. That’s normal. You grew up in a different country and culture and you’re a guest in theirs. Let your translators know that it’s okay for them to not translate something you’ve said if they would recommend it be presented in a different way. Be open to that and let them know that you appreciate them helping you avoid unintentional cultural missteps.

Be Flexible

The lessons don’t need to be followed word-for-word. You’ll need to modify them based on the ages of the students in your class, their English skill level, the time you have for each class session, etc.

You’ll know some of these things in advance (‘Each of my class sessions will be 45 minutes.'). You will only know others once you meet your students and the class gets rolling. It’s important to be able to sense class dynamics each day and make changes on-the-fly.

Are the students better at English than you thought they would be? Great! You can pick up the pace and cover more material each day. Is a lot more time being consumed by translation than you expected? No problem! You can shorten the lesson while still ensuring that the key points are covered.

Each lesson contains discussion questions and topics for conversation related to the day’s material. These have been included to keep your class time conversational, but also to make it easy for you to extend or shorten the day’s material. Simply add or skip discussion questions or topics to make a lesson longer or shorter.

Make It Conversational

A major goal of English Bible Camp is for the students to have opportunities to converse with English-speakers. If the teacher does all of the talking and the students just listen—well, we all know that a one-way conversation isn’t much of a conversation.

As early and as often as you can, signal to your students that it’s okay for them to ask questions and share their thoughts during class time. They may not open up at first; they may be expecting a strict ‘school’ environment that discourages a lot of student/teacher interaction. But once they realize that they are encouraged to talk, ask questions, and share their own ideas, you’ll find that everyone is getting a lot more out of your class time—including you.

Above All These: Love

Colossians 3:14 reminds us

And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

and 1 Corinthians 13:1 reminds us

If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

Make sure love is the main ingredient in everything you do. Even if you could prepare every lesson perfectly and could speak every language on earth perfectly, leaving out love would make you nothing more than a confusing noise machine.

People all around the world are desperately seeking things that they think will make life meaningful or make it make sense. Whether they know it yet or not, God is the missing piece of the puzzle, and He’s calling for them to come home to Him.

Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors as ourselves, and He made it clear that every person everywhere is our neighbor. He told us to go and make disciples in every part of the world. He sent the Holy Spirit to enable us to bring the Good News to people in every imaginable culture and situation.

Every student you meet and work with, every student’s family, every translator, every church member, every host family member, every person you pass on the street—God deeply loves every one of them and deeply desires that they would turn away from sin and come home to Him. He loves them so much that He sacrificed His Son to make it possible for them to come home.

We can’t possibly express a love like His in just words. We must love. Not with ordinary human love, but with a love that looks and feels different. The kind of love that can only come from having the Spirit of God in our lives. The love that not only makes the list of the fruit of God’s Spirit but is at the top of the list. Love that is so different from what the world usually sees presented as ‘love’ that it serves as a shining indicator of our authenticity. Love that shows who we are and whose we are.

By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.
John 13:35 (ESV)

Love lifts Jesus up so others can be drawn to Him. Love is not optional. Love is the key to everything.

Pray before and during your time at English Camp that God will shine His love through you to reach people for Him. Pray that nothing you do or say will get in the way of His love. Pray that travel-related annoyances, schedule changes, unexpected delays, lack of sleep, language issues, unfamiliar foods, doubts about your abilities, missing folks back home…nothing will get you into a state that will overshadow the love that you are there to share. Those are all real things that we can’t avoid, but we can tell God that we’re depending on Him to handle those things so His work through us isn’t derailed and His love won’t be obscured by them.