No two are alike: ハロウィーンのこと -- About Halloween

Although delayed, I promised a Halloween related post, so here it is. I apologize for the delay in updating, but I was sick (for a whole week) and actually missed half the day at school on Halloween. Perhaps another post on the medical system in Japan for later, but for now, I'll try to update shorter posts.

Because Halloween is such a big marketing gig in the U.S. and a "tradition" for most kids there, I decided to stretch it out over a few classes in October. I'll talk about the JHS first. For the third years, I printed out the lyrics to "This is Halloween" from The Nightmare before Christmas (which believe it or not, most kids haven't heard of!!!) with 20 blanks to make it a listening activity. The kids who liked the song repeated "This is Halloween, this is Halloween" in the hallways thereafter!

For the second years, we did a word search with Halloween words and I gave the first three (or four) stickers as rewards. I like seeing the kids who usually struggle during the normal activity succeed, it's nice and I hope they feel good about themselves!

For the first years, sadly I didn't get to add anything to the lesson, so because of the restricted class time I dedicated two whole days (when not teaching) to making possibly my best poster ever.

Here was the long, arduous but oh so rewarding process:

First I measured and calculated how big each letter would be, how much space to leave in between, etc.
Then I cut out the letters with a box opener, traced the A and O middle, glued the black poster on the orange one, glued the cutouts on the orange poster.
I continued by printing and cutting (in an amusing fashion) the pictures and text that I wrote.
And in the end, I was really happy and super impressed by my poster.

But still, not all students got to talk Halloween in class, so I came up with a system of games and rewards where the prize(s) is Halloween stickers! Very cute, a lot of them and cheap (from Daiso, the equivalent of the dollar store). So there was three levels of word searches and one sheet of unscrambling words in the hopes that students would forget they're doing English in all the fun they were having. I'm not too sure how well that worked, but as of now, a few of them have come to collect their stickers!

Here is what the board looked like:

Then I had an after school activity where interested students came and designed Jack'o'Lantern faces. 教頭先生 (kyoutou sensei), the vice-principal, came and helped me as the other teacher "assigned" to help me dropped in maybe twice. And I was happy that a first year special ed student came, because I never have class with her, so it was a good opportunity for both of us to meet. So while listening to my 6 track Halloween CD, students (surprisingly all girls) had fun designing and cutting out faces, then making a second or third face! The vice-principal went and got some papers and cut out a ton of paper pumpkins on which to glue the leftover faces.

Here's what the board looked like after I put them up, and the faces that got to be on the real pumpkins: