10/13: Halloween

Thomas with his monster mouth teeth

Me with my fifth grade after school boys making graveyards

Adrian with his graveyard

Monster Mouths

Jacob with his graveyard

My classroom with pumpkins, spiders and ghosts



Our cemetery

My pupucha, Tyler

First and Second Grade Pumpkins

Owen making his graveyard

Jacob being a vampire

Blake with his graveyard

Ghost Lollipops I made

Halloween in Korea is not really celebrated/celebrated at all. There is a zombie run in Seoul and a couple other events. Some bars have Halloween specials and some people who go out do dress up in costumes but that’s really all there is. There isn’t Halloween candy sold in stores and the stores that do sell Halloween stuff just have a really small section for it. The kids don’t dress up or really have any idea what it is except that candy is involved somehow.

Although I really hate Halloween it doesn’t mean that I wanted to deprive my after school kids of the Halloween traditions so for the weeks leading up to Halloween we did some Halloween activities. All my afternoon classes watched a Halloween movie/show with Korean subtitles. My little first graders all got to color and decorate a pumpkin. My older kids got to decorate a pumpkin and make a tombstone for themselves. It was really cute too cause my fifth and sixth graders got really into their tombstones drawing ghosts and such. It was so cute because most of my kids wanted to write their name and “die” next to it (I know it’s “XXX is dead” but they were so adamant about it that many of the tombstones just read “XXXX die”). Except my 6^th grade Ryan when I telling him that other kids were writing “die” he curls up and goes “Oh no teacher, Ryan not die.” It was hilarious and so so cute!

We also played some Halloween games and I taught them some Halloween vocabulary. There is this one awesome Halloween powerpoint game where throughout the game various ghosts and monsters pop up on the TV screen. It was great and the kids got really into it except for my third grade Ryan who kept turning away from the TV screen and was so scared of the monsters and ghosts. I felt so bad for him but it was so cute at the same time.

On the day of Halloween itself, I decided that my fifth and sixth graders were old enough to have a Halloween party so I pulled out all the stops. The night before I made cookie monster mouths (just cookies with marshmallows) and bought stuff for the kids to make gravestones. I also created a scavenger hunt around school where I put pieces of a skeleton all around school grounds with hints to the next bodypart. The hunt itself turned out pretty good but the kids did get yelled at a lot for running around and they ended up taking some of the clues I had taped to the walls which meant that other teams couldn’t read the clues. They pretty much got it and they ended up having a blast both during the hunt and during the party where they made their gravestones and I played monster mash music. I also had created a “pin the nose on the pumpkin” game and had Wii Just dance videos available but we didn’t even need them. Halloween at school was a lot of work but really fun.

Later that night I played volleyball with my team and then went to a Halloween Party hosted by another Native English Teacher. The party was low key as we all had school the following day but there was some awesome food and it was nice to catch up with some of the other teachers! Overall I would say this Halloween beats last years Halloween where I was in Botswana and just went to Linga Longa for dinner.