Halloween Lesson
Sunday, November 07, 2021This year I get to lead 3rd and 4th grade lessons at two of my schools. I'm the one who makes the plans and teaches the lessons. Since I have the freedom to do things how I want, I decided that I want to do cultural lessons when I can.
The first one I did was for Halloween.
I did a Halloween lesson way back 2018, during my first year:
I don't remember the full contents of the lessons, but we had two types of lessons for 3rd/4th and 5th/6th. In 3rd and 4th grade, the final activity was to make jack-o-lantern masks from paper plates. In 5th and 6th grade, we did a black box activity and I think we also did a human scramble activity with string to represent a spider web.
Since then, I haven't done anything for Halloween. So this year, I wanted to do something. With Covid, we've been doing a lot of craft activities, so I didn't want to do the mask activity, and since we're trying to keep social distance, the other activities wouldn't work either.
This is what I came up with!
About Halloween
Since this is a cultural lesson, I had to discuss Halloween. I talked about what it was, what kind of things we do during Halloween, and how Miss Christine celebrated.
I stopped celebrating after elementary school. After I graduated from Trick or Treating, I was usually in charge of handing out candy.
I did get to participate in some Halloween events here in Japan. In my last two towns, they held Halloween events for elementary students to sign up for. In my first town, it was an event lead by my company so the 3 English teachers they had (including me) were required to participate. In my second town, it was an optional event. One of the teachers I was working with was part of the committee that was putting up the event and she asked all the English teachers to participate.
I was Donald Duck for two years in a row~ And yes, I do have two different Donald Duck costumes xD
Story Time
I love using picture books in lessons. They're always fun and they're an easy way to expose students to more English. Unfortunately, my experience with English education in Japan has shown me that Japan doesn't share my ideas. Compared to other Asian countries, Japan's English level is extremely low. I don't understand why the textbook teaches what it does. The topics don't make sense sometimes...and students really aren't learning how to build upon what they learn.
Anyway, please excuse that rant. The point was, I wish there were more English picture books available at school to be able to use in class and for students to look at in their own time.
I got excited thinking about using a story for a lesson, and I did a lot of researching for what book I would use.
I had to find a way to make it visible for all the students. In a normal situation I could have them move close together and read it to them, but since we're social distancing, that wasn't possible.
So what I did is take pictures of the pages with the class iPad and mirrored it on to the TV. I also found sound effects on YouTube to match the story. Before revealing the next character, I would play the sound and ask the students to guess who was coming next.
New Words
I kept the new words simple. I only used the characters from the story, so a total of 5 words. I played the missing game with for a few minutes before moving on to the day's highlight.
Pictionary
Honestly speaking, I had no idea what Halloween activity to do. So I just decided to do a fun game with a slight Halloween twist: Pictionary with Pumpkin points!
Basically, instead of giving each team a number point, they'd get a pumpkin. For the words, I just used vocabulary that we studied. I found that it was easiest to use foods and fruits. I divided the class into two teams, and one volunteer from each team would come up to the blackboard to draw the same thing. They had 10 seconds to draw their picture. When time was up, on the count of 3, the other students with raise their hands. The homeroom teach would pick whoever they saw was the fastest.
The kids really enjoyed the game. Each pumpkin had a different face, so students were excited to see what kind of pumpkin was coming next.
Trick or Treat
The last thing I had planned was a Halloween Experience~ I bought a huge set of jack-o-lantern stickers, way too much honestly...but they were a set and it was the only one I could find on Amazon for cheap and for what I wanted to do.
Basically, I had the students come up to me or the homeroom teacher and "knock" on the desk. After exchanging greetings, students had to say "Trick or Treat" in order to get their Halloween treat.
Any with that, the Halloween lesson was finished~
Overall, my Halloween lesson was a success! It was easy to prepare for, and everyone had a good time~ My next cultural lesson is probably going to be Xmas, as long as I can fit it in without disrupting the unit flow. If I happen to do it, I'll make another post ;)
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