Halloween with My Korean Students

Happy Halloween!

It’s been such a crazy week at work. I’ve been stressing out over open class, meeting with the principal, lesson plan changes, preparing for Halloween, and Halloween itself. It’s been a week of loss of appetite, lack of sleep, constant headaches, and chaos all around. Even so, it is one of those weeks that I will remember. For the bad and the good. Honestly, the stress and headaches doesn’t end today – so much to worry and figure out next week as well. But the weekend allows us to temporarily leave behind the work at work.

The pros and cons of organizing Halloween as a native English teacher.

Let’s start with the cons:

– money; all the expenses of the candy and prizes comes out of my personal income, which is not something to be taken lightly when you have over 700 students

– organizing all 26 classes so that they all get a chance to participate

– time; I started planning for this two weeks in advance, both the logistics of all the events, costume preparation, and prizes

– no break time; class and trick or treaters kept me busy from the moment I got to school till after lunch

Pros:

– getting the students excited and happy

– seeing their smiles and enthusiasm

List of pros is definitely shorter than the cons but it was all worthwhile.

So what exactly did I have planned for them? It was a 3-event Halloween.

1. Guessing Game 1: What will Carmen teacher be for Halloween?

2. Guessing Game 2: How many pieces of candy are inside the jack-o’lantern bucket?

3. Trick or Treatin’ at the English classroom on Halloween

Halloween Prep

Buying a bag of candy and counting how much is inside to figuring out how many bags in what combination I needed to buy to have enough for all my students to have two candies apiece.

Carefully counting and calculating how much candy can fit into the bucket.

Making my Mickey shorts.

Mickey hands with white gloves and black pipe cleaners.

Ballots for the two events for all the students.

Decoration on the whiteboard to countdown and get the students excited for the upcoming events.

The evening before Halloween – figuring out the winners of the events and preparing the prizes. There were two winners for the candy guessing and I had to run to the store after work to buy a new bucket and split the candy in half.

Halloween Day

The first winner of the jack o’lantern candy. I was super surprised that anyone could guess the exact number of candy (213).

Second winner of the jack o’lantern.

The first break time – my first Trick or Treaters. This is before it got crazy.

I had only asked the students to wear Halloween colours (orange or black) – but some students went all out. So awesome.

A cute little wizard.

My complete costume – Mickey teacher for the day.

My beautiful co-teachers who assisted me with maintaining order (as much order as was possible given everything) during all the chaos. Thank you!