Phone lessons are excruciating. They make a teacher go bald, and kids not to want to ever study English again. Whoever thinks that by including them, or insisting on them, as a teaching tool for young learners, needs to be removed from any program decision making, regarding English education. Even as a fun exercise, phone conversations with young learners, for the most part, do not work. They are really not fun in most instances.

Here's why:

* Parents forget pre-arranged times and get annoyed when you phone.
* No one home when you phone. Then the angry parent wonders why their little darling missed out.
* Siblings answer and then hang-up.
* Siblings take the mickey out of you.
* Students and parents also hang-up for no apparent reason.
* Siblings or friends yelling and screaming in the background.
* Uncontrollable laughing from the student when you are trying to converse with them.
* Long periods of silence
* Yes/no to everything.
* Mothers answering all the questions in the background.
* And the best one....total silence.

If you must do it then:

* Keep it super easy.
* Aim the content at the slowest and least able.
* Don't introduce any new ideas or words.
* Speak super clearly and slow down. They can't see your mouth, eyes, or gestures.
* Brush up on your introductory Korean. Always start in Korean. It saves the phone slams.
* Keep it to a minute or two. It gets tough even for the chatty ones.

Look, others may of had some success, but the teachers that I observed, and the ones that have complained to me about having to do phone teaching, all came up with the same problems. Good luck if you are doing it LI.

i did video calls for a few camps when I first arrived (don't have to do those anymore, thank god). if you can, insist on video, phone has to be absolutely miserable.

i had 15 minutes with each student, the one that worked best for me was a "movie camp" where i just pulled up scene-it on zoom. just make sure to also throw in some vocab and maybe a crossword puzzle and a word search and whatnot for them to do at home to appease the coteacher, assuming they care, and you're good to go.

* Mothers answering all the questions in the background.

Additionally, mothers answering them incorrectly.

Then August, it's off to a beach location like Pohang or Busan or if too expensive, or it's off to Seoul instead.  Motels and hotels along the coast getting booked up and too expensive like crazy.  So, probably off to Seoul.  Plenty of deals.  We shall see. 

      Some unasked for advice: don't go to either Pohang or Busan. Go to the smaller cities and towns along the coast! The beaches are just as good, and they're a lot less likely to be crowded.
Also, motels and hotels kind of suck. One should be looking into pensions, or AirbnBs. If you go with a friend or 2, they're more or less the same price, but you get an entire home to yourself. Last winter vacation, we ended up near Gangneun, rented a pension 5 with a big yard, a deck, and a hot-tub. As there were 4 and half of us splitting the bill, per person it ended up being about the same as a cheap motel. And there's *loads* of stuff to do if you have a vehicle and enjoy a bit of exploring!