Halloween!

Happy Halloween!

Today I was at Ruiz Jimenez with my 3rd grade class and two 5th grade classes. We made paper jack-o-lanterns, played Halloween bingo and some students got their faces painted. I even brought a simple disfraz (costume) for Irene and me (a leopard and a devil)!

On my way home after school I stopped at the marisqueria (seafood restaurant) on our street for lunch. I had a bocadillo de calamares fritos (fried calamari sandwich) and got some more calamari-like fish as my tapa.

Later I decided to carve pumpkins at my house. One was going to say Alcalá and the other was going to say Venceslada (the name of one of my schools) but part of the way through the process my cold/fever reared it's ugly head again and I was out for the count. Sad day. I realized it's been so long since I carved a pumpkin! The pumpkins were pretty tiny (at least compared to the pumpkins in the US)...did you know they used to make jack-o-laterns out of turnips? That would take some serious skill!

Unfortunately the rest of Halloween was pretty boring. I was sick and in bed all evening and hardly knew it was Halloween. I even brought a Halloween costume this year and didn't get to really use it. At least there's carnaval in the spring!

I did a couple other Halloween activities with my classes over the last couple weeks that I forgot to include so I'll just throw them in here. Before each of these activities we went over the vocabulary, wrote it on the board and then they wrote the vocab in their vocabulary notebooks...

Halloween Crossword (Hints in spanish, they have to put the word in English in the puzzle.) I had to be clear in telling them that you have to start the word in the box with the number, and that they had to leave a space in between "haunted" and "house." I also had to tell them what "across" and "down" meant and emphasize correct spelling or the words wouldn't fit.

 I found this word search online. I can't remember where from though, so if you made it, thank you!

 This worksheet had the pictures on it and boxes in the correct shape of a letter (long boxes for letters like 'l' and 'g' and short boxes for letters like 'a.' They had to fill in the blanks.

I used these as big flashccards as we were going over vocabulary, then when we were done going over vocabulary they each got one to color. Some of them didn't have as much to color (the bat was already black and the ghost was already white), so on those drawings they were supposed to put more Halloween-related images in the background (spider webs, ghosts, moon, etc).

 I actually didn't get a chance to do this activity, but I'll explain it. They are learning parts of the body so I printed off flashcards with "mouth, nose, eyes and teeth." I also took the opportunity to introduce shapes "triangle, circle/round, square." They were supposed to be in partners and one would describe a jack-o-lantern face..."2 square eyes, 1 triangle nose, etc" and their partner would try to make the jack-o-lantern on orange paper like their partner was describing.

I also was going to teach them "left" and "right" in case they wanted more specific instructions for their partner, but we didn't get to it.