Well, you see, we dress up in costumes. Like witches, and ghosts, and stuff. Then we go knock on strangers' doors and they give us candy! Oh, and we take knives to these big orange vegetables we call pumpkins, and we make faces in them. And then we have a big party!
After browsing lots of Halloween websites I settled on two main activities for the week to practice our new vocabulary words: watching "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown", and practicing writing with horror story prompts. I also brought candy to class, and not coincidentally, had my highest attendance rates of the semester.
I saw Charlie Brown as the perfect way to "waste" twenty-five minutes of class, but I did not anticipate how much I would hate it after watching the same episode seven times in three days. I think in economics this is called the law of diminishing marginal utility. I can now repeat every line word-for-word, and pinpoint to the second which parts are going to crack Chinese college students up. Luckily, my students seemed to really enjoy it.
For the Halloween writing activity, I had them stand in a circle and gave them each a piece of paper with the opening sentence of a horror story on it. Each person added one sentence to the paper and then passed it to the next person, who added another sentence and passed it, and so on. In theory, the paper would make its way around the circle and be a complete story once it returned to its original owner. While the kids had a ball with this, the actual quality of the final product varied tremendously. I included a few good and bad (unedited) examples below, with a little bit of comedic commentary added in. Different colors represent when a different student started writing.
Tom ran through the dark forest... He was very hungry. He searched something to eat. At this moment, he found a bag. Then he picked up this bag and found so many delecious candy and food there. Then, he set on the grass and eat. But blood start spitting out of his mouth when he eat. He found all the food was gone, and lots of blood on his hands. At that time, he felt something in his mouth and spited it. What he spited out was a snack. The snack look at him and say "Hello, I was a girl once". He was very scared. He thought the snack could be good luck, but as he was scared, he ran back home as soon as he could. A week later, he died. Someone said he became a snack too.
(I love this one because it was definitely the most creative of the bunch. Who knew snacks could be the antagonist of a horror story? I will never look at my oreo's the same again.)
Nancy was very scared... when she see a animal! It's not a usual animal. It had black fare with two sharp teeth. It looks like very ugly. And it is very fearful! She want to eat people. Then she characte as a ghost. But she meet a beautiful man!
(While I'm not entirely sure what happened, at least she found love in the end!)
Sarah did not believe in monsters, until... When the Holliween come, at night. A strange man knock the door of Sarah's. He's listening a voice and looking a small thing! It's a white one with fur. Then Sarah saw a pair of red eyes. He think it must be a child. Actually, it isn't a child. It is a E.T. with UFO.
(This is the only one that made me say WTF aloud to myself.)
People say, "Vampires are not real." But... I don't think so, I think vampires are real. One day, I walked through the forest. Suddenly I found someone was behind me. Being scared, I ran fast. So did it. Then I saw there's a river in front of me, so I jump in the river. But the water became warm and bloody, until I realized this was not a river but a blood river. I felt something bad will happen to me, then a black shadow come to me. A big mouth with buckteeth was in front of my face. Then... then... was it vampire? I couldn't believe it, but it was real. So, watch out your back!
(This gem came from my favorite class who keep me from feeling I'm a complete failure at teaching on a weekly basis...)
The rest of the stories generally ended one of two ways:
1. The main character would find out his friends were just playing a joke on him.
2. The main character was eaten.
To conclude, and as a reward for reading this far, here's a picture I showed in class of me trick-or-treating when I was little:
And just to embarrass her, here's one of my sister:
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