This is a fun activity where I teach students about American Halloween, monster vocabulary, allow them to color/decorate a Halloween mask, and go trick or treating (with actual candy!). My students are low level high school students with low motivation, but this activity got most people engaged. It can be adjusted to be more difficult or simpler.
Materials needed: scissors, colored pencils, markers, chopsticks, tape, candy, PowerPoint, and printouts.
To start I have a ppt where I introduce Halloween to students. I ask basic questions about Halloween to gauge what students already know about Halloween and then add some new information for them to ponder. I then show them pictures of my childhood Halloween experiences and if I have time I have the students try and guess what I was dressed as, which they love.
Then I transition to more of the main activity. Here I teach them some new vocabulary about common American monsters. There are two versions of this I use with my students. In the ppt the first 6 monsters are really common and a bit more likely for them to know information in English. I show them the picture of the monster, and ask them to provide me with any information they know about the monster. The students usually respond in Japanese and with some encouragement I can sometimes get English answers. What they don’t know in English I provide and I write at least 4 characteristics of each monster on the board. So for example, Frankenstein, I would write “lightning, green, big/tall, metal bolts, strong, etc.”. The harder version has slightly less common monsters and most of my students don’t know any english to describe them, so they are getting more new vocabulary to work with.
I then transition to explaining my expectations of them. I show them their options for creating a monster mask, I have drawn on procreate a colorable outline of each monster that I have placed in the PowerPoint. I have a binder I brought around with a bunch of folders with enough printouts for students to be able to choose whatever monster they wanted to color. I then tell them I expect them to color or decorate their monsters, cut them out, and attach a chopstick to the back with tape so they can wear the mask. I then introduce how they can receive candy. I expect them to come up to me with a finished product and complete a trick or treating dialogue.
An example of this dialogue is: Student “Trick or treat!” ALT “WOW! How cute/scary/interesting you are! What monster are you?” Student “I am a ________________.” ALT “What kind of monster is that?” Students are then expected depending on their level to provide me either 2-4 previously discussed facts/characteristics of their monster. And once they have said all of that information I gave them candy. (My schools english department allowed me to use some of their budget to purchase candy for the students, so definitely ask about that if you try this activity).
While they are coloring I usually play American music for students to listen to listen to and this helps to provide atmosphere and keep chatting down a bit.
At the end I let students either keep their masks or give them to me and I would post them on a section of the wall around the school which I was allowed to decorate for Halloween. The whole month I did this activity students really enjoyed showing their friends from other classes their masks and it was a fun topic of conversation among students and teachers alike. I even got some of my JTE’s to make a mask.