Halloween week for the kids

Since we have vacation from Oct. 25- Nov. 5, I decided to teach the kids Halloween this week just for fun. So far, we have had a blast. All the kids kinda know what Halloween is since they sort of celebrate it here and they have seen it in movies. It's not the gigantic party as we have all come to know and love in the US, however, they do have some trick or treating, some costumes and some decorations. That's not really bad for a country that really doesn't like borrowing customs from other countries. At least the French acknowledge that Halloween exists for other countries. I think that there was a lot of pressure from the little French kids to finally institute Halloween in France for the free candy.

I did buy a very small baby-sized pumpkin here at the grocery store and carved it up in a couple minutes with the basic design of triangle eyes and a mouth with teeth. He was very cute. I took him to all the classes and lit a candle inside him. At the end of each class, I turned off all the lights and walked him around to all the awed children. They don't really carve pumpkins here so most of the kids were super impressed. I explained that normally our pumpkins are about 2 or 3 times bigger than the baby one I did but they don't really exist here. They can be found in France but I wasn't about to lug a 25 pound pumpkin around to 8 different classes in 2 different schools. So I settled on my little baby 2-3 pound pumpkin.

In school, I have taught some of the basic words of Halloween: vampire, bat, ghost, candy, pumpkin, jack o' lantern, devil, witch, & skeleton. Some of the kids knew some of the words which was encouraging and lots of fun. My favorite part of teaching the words was using the flashcards (that I colored myself thank-you-very-much) and then referring to my jack o' lantern. So the kids would repeat vampire and then I would point to the jack o' lantern and make them say that word. It was probably more fun for me to watch them say "vampire" and then run to the other side of the room and point and they would say "jack o' lantern". It was tons of fun. I was determined that they would remember jack o' lantern, if they remembered no other words from the lesson.

I also taught: "Trick or treat. Smell my feet. Give me something good to eat." The kids loved that once I explained what it meant.

For the final lesson tomorrow, we are all going to draw really cool jack o' lanterns, all the kids are going to trick or treat to me for some M&Ms, I am going to show a bunch of pumpkin patch pictures and already carved pumpkins and we will sing the part of the Trick or Treat song I taught. I feel like I might get more excited than the kids just because I love watching their faces light up when they know a word.

British word(s) lesson of the day: sweeties = candy & pumpkin = pumpkin and/or jack o' lantern. In a sentence: I went trick or treating and got a lot of sweeties. We saw a ton of pumpkins but my pumpkin had the best design of all.