Hello, everybody at home! Hello, all you ALTs!
IT'S HALLOWEEN TIME!!!
As such, I'm making lots of Halloween lessons! People from home, feel free to help me brainstorm. People from Japan, feel free to steal ideas for your own lessons and help me brainstorm. ;)
First, my card game! :D
I got the idea from here: http://bogglesworldesl.com/prepositions.htm.
I loved them, so I started talking to people, and then began making my own. :3
I... have no idea how I'll use them in class, but I have a lot. I think it'll be something about "find someone with the same preposition" or something, but I need to look at the decks and make sure everybody has pairs, since I haven't printed off matching sets.
Ureshino High School Halloween Presentation:
This presentation will be made in front of 140 students, and will last 50 minutes. I will have access to Power Point. I believe I also have access to an audio system. It'd be good to establish that, though.
I think I will make it a bilingual presentation-- I explain things in English, and then my JTE explaining it in Japanese. This allows for accessibility, since this lesson is about building interest, not English lessons. This is an
excellent opportunity for them to practice their listening skills, so they should hear English.
Possible Videos:
Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”
E.T. Halloween (confusing? )
Dracula clips
Six Flags Goblin/Creature Clips
Peanuts/Snoopy’s Halloween
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_Great_Pumpkin,_Charlie_Brown
Old Mickey Mouse Halloween clip
Nightmare Before Christmas
Wikipedia Says:
"Halloween (or All Hallows eve) is an annual holiday observed on
October 31, which commonly includes activities such as
trick-or-treating, decorating, attending costume parties, carving
jack-o'-lanterns, bonfires, apple bobbing, visiting haunted
attractions, playing pranks, telling scary stories, and watching
horror films."
History:
Coming between fall and winter, harvest (plenty) and winter (need),
the light half of the year and the dark half of the year, and life and
death, Halloween marks the time for celebration and superstition. It
is a time of harvest, slaughtering livestock, and preparing for the
winter. Halloween is sometimes believed to be a day when the
boundaries between the living world and the spirit world was weak,
hence all the spirits.
Halloween comes from a mixture of old European beliefs— ancient Irish
religious festivals like Samhain, where the villages lit big bonfires,
tossed in the bones of slaughtered livestock, walked between the fires
for purification, lit all of their hearth-fires from the common flame,
and wore costumes to ward off ghosts; Roman fertility and harvest
festivals; and Christian beliefs such as All Souls Day, where people
pray that the souls of the dead can get into heaven. The Halloween
tradititon came to America through Scottish and Irish immigrants, but
in recent years Americans have re-started old European traditions rom
many different countries, including American American voodoo;
witchcraft, ghosts, and monsters from Germany. Some Christian groups
do not believe in Halloween, but usually it is a secular holiday full
of parties, food, costumes, and frightening decorations. Halloween has
become more and more famous in America over the past 30-40 years. It
is now second only to Christmas in the amount of money Americans spend
on decorations/costumes/other things. It is because of this massive
commercialization that it has spread to other nations, such as in
South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, mainland Europe, and Japan.
As a holiday, Halloween offers a safe environment to teach children
about death, mortality, and fear. Children dress as frightening
creatures and go from door to door asking for candy with
“Trick-or-Treat!”, and there are often costume parties and
decorations. Halloween allows people to celebrate what they would not
otherwise be. Halloween endures because it allows its participants to
both embrace and defuse their fears (Thompson 2003).
Halloween Activities:
- Halloween Fashion Show: show the students pictures of my Favorite Halloween Costumes. Explain Costume Parties, which are for adults nowadays as much as they are for children. Traditional costumes include witches, devils, skeletons. There are now expanded to archetypes, including ninjas and princesses, and cosplay, like Power Rangers and Spiderman, and visual puns, such as a facebook profile, someone getting eaten by a shark, etc. Basically, with modern costumes, anything goes.
- Bobbing for apples.
- Watching horror movies
- Telling scary stories
- Trick-or-Treating: Originated in the Brittish Isles. In America, they used to do a trick (take off the wheels of a wagon, cover the house in toilet paper) if the people inside did not give them a treat. Part of the rise of Trick-or-Treating was to keep young people from committing vandalism. Today, there are still pranks, but it is rare and considered rude. If the light on, you can go trick-or-treating, if the light is off, you shouldn’t visit the house.
- Haunted Houses
- Corn field mazes
- Carving Pumpkins: Jack-o-Lanterns.
- Decorating: haunted yards. Skulls, mummies, skeletons, ghosts, other signs of death. Jack-o-Lanterns. Other autumn decorations, like corn husks, squashes, and scarecrows, are prevalent.
Symbols:
Jack-o-Lanterns..
things you don’t like: spiders, bats, death.
Black Cats—superstition, bad luck. Tied with the devil and witches.
Bats—superstition, bad luck, fly in hair. Tied with Dracula.
From Literature:
Vampires—Dracula.
Frankenstein
Colors: Black and Orange
Pumpkins: Indigenous to North America
Food:
Autumn food like candy apples, Candy corn, pumpkin and pecan pie,
Candy Apples: At one time, candy apples were commonly given to
children, but the practice rapidly waned in the wake of widespread
rumors that some individuals were embedding items like pins and razor
blades in the apples.[33] While there is evidence of such
incidents,[34] they are quite rare and have never resulted in serious
injury. Nonetheless, many parents assumed that such heinous practices
were rampant because of the mass media. At the peak of the hysteria,
some hospitals offered free X-rays of children's Halloween hauls in
order to find evidence of tampering. Virtually all of the few known
candy poisoning incidents involved parents who poisoned their own
children's candy.[35]
Presentation Notes:
Remember costume: Dress appropriately! :D
Activities: Draw on white, black, orange colored paper—it would be nice to post them afterwards for all the students to see.
* * *
More Activity Ideas:
-Toss beanbags into Trick-or-Treat Jack-o-Lantern baskets, shouting a
word each time? Practices speaking speed.
Halloween Writing Web Grades 3+
I put up a large yarn spider web on a bulletin board. Inside the web I
put 4x6 cards with writing ideas. For example-write a menu for Road
Kill Kafe; write a recipe for Witches' Brew; Creature Feature-devise a
devious plot for a play or TV show, write the script, act it out;
Monsters in the News-you are a reporter sent to cover a riot in
Ghoulsville-write the story and illustrate; Monster House-design a
monster house and write the copy to sell the real estate; Write a
Position Wanted newspaper ad selling yourself for a job-list all
qualifications and the horrible position you are looking for. There
lots more that you can think of to add. I post their finished products
around the perimeter of the board.
Halloween Riddles
1. What kind of music do ghosts like?
2. Why did the ghost take his family on an elevator ride every day?
3. What do ghosts do when they want to start up a computer?
4. How did the ghost do at the comedy club?
5. What do you call a website for ghosts?
6. What is Casper's favorite sticky treat?
7. Where do baby ghosts come from?
8. Why did the ghost go to the doctor?
9. What would you get if you crossed a cocker spaniel, a French
poodle, and a ghost?
10. Who protects the shores where spirits live?
11. What did the papa ghost say to his ghostly children?
12. What is a ghost's favorite direction?
13. Why couldn't the ghost ride the bus?
14. Why did the ghost rush home from school?
15. Why did the police officer arrest the ghost?
16. What do young ghosts call their moms and dads?
17. Where do little ghosts learn to yell "BOO!"?
18. Why are ghosts like newspaper?
Answers
1. Rhythm and boos.
2. To raise their spirits.
3. They boo-t it up!
4. He was a dead-knockout.
5. Bahoo or Yaboo!
6. Boo-ble gum.
7. Boo Genes.
8. To get a booster shot.
9. A cocker-poodle-boo!
10. The Ghost Guard.
11. Fasten your sheet belt.
12. Horror-zontal.
13. Because he didn't have exact chains.
14. To watch an afterghoul special on TV.
15. Because he didn't have a haunting license.
16. Transparent.
17. In noisery school.
18. Because they appear in sheets.
Resources:
Links To Start With:
http://www.history.com/topics/halloween
http://wilstar.com/holidays/hallown.htm
http://www.randomhistory.com/2008/09/01_halloween.html
Directory:
http://www.dmoz.org/Society/Holidays/Halloween/
Lesson Ideas:
-Halloween Preschool Games (Good for Elementary School ALTs?)
http://www.perpetualpreschool.com/halloween_games.html
-Good Ideas for Halloween Games:
http://seasonal.theteacherscorner.net/halloween/
-Halloween Epitaphs—each student makes a gravestone. (Involves internet research, perhaps too hard.)
http://seasonal.theteacherscorner.net/halloween/epitaphs.php
-Halloween Journals:
http://worksheets.theteacherscorner.net/seasonal/halloween/
-Halloween Story Ideas:
http://seasonal.theteacherscorner.net/halloween/storyideas.php
-Bat Poet Page:
http://www.batbox.org/poetry/
-More Halloween Ideas:
http://pazz.tripod.com/hallo.html
-Tacherly Halloween:
http://www.teachervision.fen.com/tv/tvsearch/theme=Halloween
And everyone loves an Everyone!
And everyone loves an Everyone!
