Impromptu Halloween

The week before Halloween I did all of my Halloween lessons at school so that I could have them all done before the season was over. They all went really well expect for the fact that I had to combine my 2 third year classes into one because one of the teachers I work with just started 2 months of sick leave.  So now I have one big class but the lesson still managed to work, much to my relief. Unfortunately, one of the students wasn't able to do any of the activities because of religious reasons. I asked my JTE what religion she was but she refused to answer :( It seemed a little extreme to sit out of the activities because one of them involved listening to Werewolves of London and filling in blanks in the lyrics and the other activity had them drawing Halloween related things on a picture of a haunted house. Personally, I don't see where the conflict lies but to each their own! We listened to Halloween music and had a good time for the rest of the class.

The next week I had some of my super genki girls from that class come up to me and ask if we were going to have a Halloween party. I thought we already had, but apparently not >.< I told them that we couldn't because with the combined classes we needed the extra week to make sure they were at the same point in the lessons and that we needed that week's class to even things out. We were all sad about it but I considered it resolved. That is until 4pm when they came up to me at my desk in the staff room to say that they had talked to another of their teachers and they said that I could use their class to have the party the following day. So now I had to pull another Halloween party out of parts best left unnamed.

Once I was free to leave school I raced to the grocery store to buy candy because I figured we could chill and eat for at least some of the time. After that I headed home to start coming up with Halloween games that used simple English and would appeal to a large group of 18 year olds. I was up until midnight making 40 different Halloween bingo cards by hand and 20 large print outs of pictures for a relay race.

The next day when it was time for the party I asked the teacher who was letting me use his class what room it was going to be in and he said, "Oh I thought we could do it in your room". Thanks for the warning! I could have been preping things in there! Then he casually asks, "Can you do it on your own?" Oh yeah sure no problem! Bring on the 40 18-year-olds who can't understand English and let me try and tell them how to play the games >.<

In the end it went really well though. After Bingo we played the relay race where they had to run up to the board and slap the image that I called out before the other teams could. It got super rowdy and I was a little concerned that I was going to get in trouble from other teachers trying to teach but that's what you get when you make me run a party on my own! Luckily no one complained (at least to me) and the students seemed to have a really great time.