Halloween Part II

OK, that video is awesome.  I’ve already shared it with my Spanish teacher who said “Well that makes sense. ‘Alma’ means ‘soul’ in Spanish.”  Never understood that before.

On Halloween itself I always go through the Erlkönig as sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.  I give them a copy of the lyrics and have them label who is singing (father, son, or Elf king), then watch it a second time to have them see how well the singing and music reflect the change of character.  Nice spooky piece that is classical to boot.  This is an activity that only works for German classes, but I absolutely love this song.

So what else is the the goodie bag?  Try a bunch of costume pictures.  Some examples include:

• Animal costume pictures (a Google Doc presentation I made)
• Children costumes
• Adult / Child costumes
• More Adult / Child costumes
• Spooky hairdos
• Animal hairdos

Don’t feel obligated to do all of these at once.  I did these today as a warm-up for Halloween week, but you can do it on Halloween day just as well. I started by asking what people are going to dress up as, and who is going trick or treating.  I then focused on people who didn’t know what to go as, and said I’d give them a couple of suggestions.

Once we got looking at pictures, it was pretty easy to describe them (a la Movie Talk).  If people started giving me too many “awesomes” or sidebar conversations in English I’d shut down the process until we were back on track.

Every now and then I’d ask people to assume that they were trick or treating and then got scared by something (vampire dog costume, rhino hairdo, etc.).  We then did a quick skit until it ran out of energy (throw chocolate, call for super cat to come save you, etc.) and then moved onto the next picture.