Halloween at School

As every American knows, Halloween is celebrated every year on October 31st, which is this Saturday. Halloween is a new idea for the Taiwanese, but they seem to be catching on quickly and are quite amused by the whole ordeal.

For the past two weeks, I have been teaching a Halloween class for all of my second graders. I start off by showing them a short movie clip from the "Nightmare before Christmas" to give them some visual idea of where we are going. Then I use a powerpoint to teach them all of the classic Halloween vocabulary (ie: trick-or-treat, haunted house, jack-o-lantern, witch etc). I myself now know how to say in Chinese haunted house, costume, pirate, viking, vampire and ghost, so you should be proud.


After that we get to play games. Games are always fun - I am a big fan, and so are the children. :) First we play Bingo, where I describe the Halloween word, and the students must put a piece of candy corn on the appropriate box (I would like to give a shout out to my mother who mailed me 20lbs of candy corn, after I mournfully told her that Taiwan did not carry the commodity - I tell all of my children about my amazing mother, and they all think she sounds awesome!). Then we play a guessing game, where all of the children have a piece of paper with different words clipped to their backs. They are also given a sheet of paper with a list of questions on it which they must use to find out which Halloween character they have on their back. So for instance, if they are a ghost, they must keep asking questions (Do I wear a hat? Do I play music? Am I black? Do I wear a crown?) until they find out what they are (Am I white? yes. Do I fly? yes. Am I a ghost? yes!). Last week, this game was super confusing and did not go well. I thought of scrapping it, but then the classes started understanding, and it turned out to be fun. I'm not sure if my classes this week are smarter, or whether I just figured out how to explain it more clearly...











I also gave all of the students leaf post-it notes. That is, I asked my academic director for red/orange/yellow/brown post-its in the shape of leaves for fall, and ended up with pink/green/yellow flower post-its... Not sure what happened there... Another thing I chalk up to cultural differences. The leaves don't change colors here, so the Taiwanese just don't understand. At any rate, the children were supposed to write their Chinese name, English name, class and a Halloween message on the leaves, and then tape them up on the windows. Now my windows are covered in lovely post-it notes from all 750 of my students, which makes me quite happy.


I made my room festive by drawing, cutting out and sticking up giant pumpkins all over my walls. I love fall; I love sweet corn festivals; I love apple orchards; I love pumpkin patches; I love pumpkin-flavored anything; I love raking leaves (though mostly just jumping into leaf piles...); I love the smell of everything which "fall" entails. Sadly, Taiwan has none of these things. They don't even have real pumpkins. They have miniature pumpkins, which are heart-breakingly miniature. So I cheered myself up by covering my walls in ginormous pumpkins. It took me several weeks to make all eight of the paper pumpkins, and I am pretty sure that everyone down in my office thought that I was a little nuts. Though, they probably did not need me to cut out pumpkins to provide evidence of my mild craziness...

On another Halloween note, I convinced my academic director (Tsuili) to have a school-wide costume competition on Thursday and Friday. I could tell that she was extremely dubious about my scheme, but like most other hair-brained ideas I come up with, she went along with it. We made fliers of myself dressed as a bunny, and then passed them out to teachers and posted them around the school. During the entire Halloween week, I myself dressed up every day in a different costume. On Monday, I was a tiger; Tuesday a bunny; Wednesday a tai ji master (I have the whole outfit since I do tai ji myself three days a week - yes, I do need a blog post about that... I wore my outfit with a long white beard, trying to emulate the "master" status - royally failed, for all of my students and the other teachers thought that I was trying to be Santa Claus! Now I ask you, what Santa Clause wears a black and white tai ji outfit?!!); and Thursday a princess. I had really wanted to be Cinderella, but alas, there is not a single Cinderella costume in all of Taiwan in my size. I had multiple Taiwanese friends scouring the island for me - calling their friends, searching online etc - and nothing turned up. We could not even find a passable blue skirt with which to be creative! So I had to settle for just being an ordinary princess. Anita (my co-teacher next semester) lent me a dress, which proved to make a perfect princess gown when paired with a tiara. I was kind of sad, though, that I did not have long white gloves. Not that I could have worn them here in the heat... But I diverge. Costume competition. For students - not me. :) A surprisingly large number of kids dressed-up! They had to come by the office in costume and shout out "trick-or-treat." Then we would give them candy and take their picture to be judged later. Results to be announced soon (as soon as I have time to look at the photos...).

Another exciting thing: I definitely got my principal to dress-up as a cowboy for Halloween! She is too funny.
To see more Halloween pics: http://picasaweb.google.com/gracejohnz/HalloweenAtMinghua#