Crafty Halloween!

Another idea to celebrate Halloween in class could be to doing new Halloween themed crafts. As well as doing recipes in class, crafts are a good way to use the English language in a context and for a purpose. This will help students to realize that the language they are learning is important to understand other people.

Source: Unknown

When doing crafts in class, I always like to use materials that can be easily recycled and reused. For this reason, I have classified these crafts depending on what kind of material you will need to use to create them. Let's get started!

1. Using Paper Plates. 

In almost every house, we can find leftover paper plates from birthdays or parties. Paper plates can be a good material to do easy crafts such as the following:

SCARY GHOSTS

Source: http://spoonful.com/

We can make scary ghosts to decorate our classrooms just by drawing a scary face and adding some extra details with paper like hands.

Easy and Scary Recipes for Halloween

In just a few weeks, one of the most important festivities from English Speaking Countries will be celebrated. Halloween is on the 31st of October! As we know, festivals are a great way to introduce sociocultural aspects from the English Speaking Countries. In this blog, I would like to share with you some ideas to bring Halloween into your classrooms and to help you to adapt and introduce some activities to the necessities of your students. For this reason, I'm going to try to post a variety of Halloween themed posts during this month. 

Source: http://www.illoz.com/

To start, I would like to share with you some spooky and easy recipes to make with children in class. Although cooking in class could be a little messy, we can have a great time, it can be very motivating for our students and they can learn a lot from different aspects of this activity, such as following instructions, ingredients, kitchen tools...

Recipe 1.  Scary Bananas and Little Pumpkins.

Source: http://excellent-eats.com/

In all kind of parties, there are usually lots of sweet and not very many healthy food choices. But, as you can see in this picture, we can provide healthy and scary treats for our kids. We can make some scary ghosts using bananas and chocolate chips. As well, we can turn clementines into pumpkins just peeling them and adding some stems.

Activities to help students to tell stories

Being able to use the language students are learning is one of the most important and satisfactory aspects of learning a foreign language. Pupils need to notice that what they are learning has sense and a purpose.

For this reason, teachers have to provide activities in class in which students can use the language they are learning in a meaningful way. At the beginning and especially with not so proficient students we will use appealing and guided activities that will help students to become confident using the language they are learning and telling stories can be a great way to do this.

The following activities are just an example of the activities that we can use in class. They are very engaging for our students and could be used in different ways.

• Through these activities we can get our students involved in the creation of the material that we use in class. This could be a good way of motivating our students and involving them in the activities from the beginning. 
• Students can carry out oral or written activities to practice both oral or writing skills.
• These activities allow our students to work in groups, in pairs or even individually. In this way, we can adapt the activity to the necessities of the moment: evaluating our students oral or written competence, promoting oral or written skills, playing just for fun...

Activity 1. Telling stories using pictures drawn on stones.

source: http://www.baballa.com/

Students draw pictures on stones, pieces of cardboard or even shells they find on the beach and use them to invent stories.