Halloween!

So today I taught about Halloween, not the easiest subject to explain to kids in a foreign language especially when they want to know the history of it. And especially when your JTE doesn't translate what you say properly. The first year kids wanted to know about where it came from so I tried to explain Samhain as best I could. My JTE, on being asked to translate, didn't translate what I said about Ireland, instead talking about America. This is fair enough I guess as Halloween is huge in America but they asked about the roots of it...I ended up talking about Ireland in my poor man's Japanese, but I think they understood the point I was making. It's not a big thing, but it bugs me. She's so America-centric (don't even think that's a word...).

Anyhoo, earlier this week I did some more Halloween classes with my 2nd and 3rd year selective classes. Last week I had prepared them a bit with a pre-Halloween lesson explaining different monsters and things that happen on the day and this week I provided a slightly less than usual lesson. For the 3rd years my 2nd year JTE and I prepared the music room for the lesson by blacking it out, and setting up a projector and video player and also lighting up the jack-o-lanterns that I had carved the previous night. My JTE then hid in the connecting room. I ran down to collect the students who were a little surprised at being moved upstairs. When they realised that it was going to be a special Halloween class they started getting really excitable and ran past the other selective classes on their way up. Shows them for not choosing selective English, eh. Got them into the room and sat them down before I lit a candle under my face. The only light in the room came from the 2 jack-o-lanterns and my candle. I stalked around the room telling them a story of a dark, dark house. It went something like this:

"It was a dark, dark night,
There was a dark, dark wood.
In the dark, dark wood there was a dark, dark house.
In the dark, dark house there was a dark, dark room.
In the dark, dark room there was a dark, dark cupboard.
In the dark, dark cupboard there was a dark, dark shelf.
On the dark, dark shelf there was a dark, dark box.
In the dark, dark box there was a..."

At this point I blew the candle out and my JTE thumped on the door before jumping in. It had the desired effect! Nice, short, and easy to understand. Then we watched Sleepy Hollows. I had panicked a bit about it because I wasn't sure if it was suitable for the kids but I let my JTE see it and he said it was cool so they got to watch it subtitled. I think they enjoyed the lesson and film and they asked to see the rest of it cause we didn't manage to finish it.

This all gave me an idea - I want to try set up an English film club where we meet once a week or so to watch a (subtitled) English film. I know some of the students already watch English films as I had a discussion with a couple about the Resident Evil, or Biohazard, films. Hopefully I'll be able to set something like this up, but it'll probably be a helluva lot of hassle.