Happy Halloween

Today we celebrated Halloween in my M2 Listening and Speaking class. Yesterday, Aj. Ryan, Aj. Kate (the new and so far very good replacement teacher), and I went out to buy candy for our class. We teach the same subject, but different groups of students at the same time.

I wrote in the last post about how we want to teach more of a culture class. The students already know a lot about Halloween from American television and movies, but we taught them more about its history and celebrations.

Except for the few who have lived in the United States, our students had never been trick or treating before. Today in class we told them that they were going to get to go trick or treating, but of course you can't get any candy without a costume! We brought paper that the students could use to make masks, then turned them out into the school. Each student had to visit the other American teachers at Mathayom. They had to show their masks, say "trick or treat" and answer a question about the Halloween lesson to get their candy.

two students answering a question for candy 

This was the first week that we've gone completely off book, and at first we were a little nervous about completely scrapping the textbook and writing our own original lessons. Although I chose the textbook for this year, I'll admit that it turned out to be quite boring. This week went very smoothly! So far it seems that the students are enjoying the new structure of the class, and it's much more fun for the teachers as well. You have no idea how boring it is having to listen to the same audio tracks for three hours in a row! This is much, much better.