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! :)

Upcoming workshops and webinars

New school year, new opportunities for professional development. There are new workshops, seminars and webinars on the horizon, and all of them free of charge! I'm planning to attend most of these:

• English Language Teachers Day Celebration (webinar, Sep 21)

• Predstavitvene delavnice za pouk angleščine v 1. triletju (Sep 22)

• MOOC! Shaping the Way We Teach English (webinar, starts Sep 28)

• Letters from Lili and Bine (Oct 12/Oct 22)

• OUP  Conference Slovenia (Dec 4)

Reading badge

Even though reading is just one of the four language skills, learners who read a lot improve their language abilities in general. Reading badge is a good way to promote reading among your students. There are two popular English reading badge competitions in Slovenia that you probably know, EPI Reading Badge and Bookworms. I do encourage my students to participate in these competitions, but at the same time we have our own "reading badge" projects. The problem with commercial reading badge projects is that they require students and schools to buy (or borrow) new books every year as they frequently change their reading lists. I have therefore decided to allow my students to choose their own book titles. What they have to do is read four to five level-appropriate readers of their choosing and do an activity for each od the books. Here are the activities they can choose among:

• A mind map. It should include the title, the author, the characters, three to five new English words and an illustration (suitable for younger learners).
  
• A comic. It should summarise the story from the book.
• A handwritten summary.

Students who successfully present the required number of books then get a diploma at the end of a school year. I know it sounds like a lot of work but I'm happy to say most of my students decide to participate in my reading badge projects. :)