Saturday 31 October 2015

Trick or Treat!


Halloween's here again. As English teachers, we're bound to cover cultural aspects of the English speaking countries as well as the language, so there's no way we could skip Halloween lessons. And besides, why would we want to? I always have so much fun celebrating Halloween with my young learners. Here's what we were doing for this Halloween with my first graders:


  • Paper pumpkins
They're so easy to make - what you need to do is cut two equal pumpkin shapes out of paper, colour them, staple them together (for obvious reasons, it's better if you do that for your students) and fill them with leftover paper from cutting. Staple the top last.


I'm a little pumpkin, come and play!
It's Halloween! Hurray! Hurray!
(sung to: I'm a Little Teapot)



  • Magic tricks
My favourite one is mixing colours with water - say, yellow and blue. Abracadabra, one, two, three and here's green! Also great for revising colours.









  • Talking about our costumes (introducing YL Halloween vocabulary)






  • Trick-or-treating
I tell my students to bring costumes to our Halloween lesson if they want. I always wear one myself for Halloween. We then go trick-or-treating around other classrooms. Of course, you'll need to ask your colleagues in advance if they're OK with the idea and give them some candy. Alternatively, you could ask some of the colleagues to NOT give you candy so you can play an innocent trick on them. From my experience, the students almost prefer NOT getting candy so they can play a trick!




All I have to add is I can't wait for next year's Halloween! :)