Going to camp does not have to include a tent and roasting marshmallows.

Trish Udell, international English program instructor, traveled to Yinghao College, a boarding school near Guangzhou, China, in January to teach students.

Udell said Missouri Southern and the boarding school have a relationship.

“What we want to do is build a relationship with these students so that when they start looking for universities, they will look toward Missouri Southern,” Udell said

Dr. Chad Stebbins, director of the Institute of International Studies, said the University would like to further relations with Yinghao College.

He said Udell traveling to China has gone “a long way to solidify” the relationship between Southern and the boarding school.

Udell, along with her daughter Lydia, left Jan. 13 for three weeks.

“They wanted me there one week to prepare, one week for camp and one week to do a little sightseeing,” she said.

The one-week winter camp was geared for grades three through six, and she said the top students in those grades are chosen for the camp.

“This was the first year that they’ve done it,” she said.

Udell said she planned the teaching portions of the camp.

While the students were divided into one of four tour groups, they were given passports, which they used to act like they were coming to the United States to learn about the culture.

“Each day we stopped in different cities like St. Louis, Chicago, Los Angeles [and] New York,” Udell said. “They learned about different people, vocabulary to do with the cities and things they might see there.”

The students also had travel journals where they wrote what they wanted to eat and buy in the United States, played English games, had travel English including grammar and listened to music like “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”

“The music was very powerful as far as teaching English,” Udell said. “They really latched onto that.”

Udell said with the travel journals, she brought postcards from Missouri so the students could pretend they were writing home.

During the camp, the students would earn coins and made travel posters from posters and photographs from the cities Udell brought for the class.

“They seemed to really enjoy it,” she said.

She believed the camp was “well put together,” and she said the children enjoyed the activities offered to them.

“I really liked the opportunity to work in a school there with other educators,” Udell said. “The people are just very generous with their hospitality, and it’s neat to see China.”

Udell thought there were many cultural differences between the United States and China. She said the students were eager to learn.

“It’s a big event to have native English speakers as teachers,” she said.

Each classroom, she said, had three instructors: a native English speaker, a Chinese English teacher and a Filipino.

“[It] provided a nice team because if there was something they [the students] couldn’t understand the Chinese teachers could explain it in Chinese so that worked out really well,” she said.

She thought the instructors were open to the different teaching methods.

“Most of us are more used to hands-on interactive, and that’s not really their system,” she said.

Udell said Lydia loved China.

“She actually wanted to stay longer,” she said.

One of the cultural differences they encountered was the food.

“It’s very different,” Udell said. “They eat different things. Until you really experience it, it’s different.”

She said Lydia did well with trying new foods.

“She said she pretended that she was on Fear Factor and that she would get a lot of money if she tried,” Udell said.