Happy Halloween, Huludun!
This week, we celebrated Halloween at my second school (the one I teach at Wednesdays-Fridays), Huludun Elementary School. We set aside Friday (October 28th) to celebrate Halloween. In preparation, the teachers, administrators, and I made DIY spiderwebs (using black plastic trash bags) for all of the classrooms.
For complete instructions on how to make the DIY spiderwebs, click here.
On Wednesday, we invited interested homeroom teachers and English teachers to come and make the decorative spiderwebs. We used part of our lunch break (from ~12:50pm-1:30pm) to finish all 44 spider webs.
In addition to the decorative spider webs, the school also prepared materials for an arts & crafts activity: paper bats.
Because the student body at Huludun Elementary School is so large (+1000 students), the academic administrators decided it would be most effective for me to record a video explaining how to make a Halloween-related craft for the students. (There isn't exactly an ideal venue for me to explain how to make a paper bat to +1000 students simultaneously.) The video was broadcasted in all of the classrooms' TVs on Friday morning. Typically, Friday mornings are reserved for the school-wide assembly (8:00am-8:30am), as class doesn't begin until 8:40am everyday. However, this Friday morning, we set aside time for the students to watch my video and complete the Halloween arts & craft activity in their classrooms.
I uploaded my video to YouTube -- it can be viewed below. I added the English subtitles, and with my mom's help translating, I also included subtitles in traditional Mandarin Chinese.
Because this was a school-wide activity -- all 44 homerooms were given supplies -- the school covered the cost of the materials. Actually, the spider webs and the paper bats were relatively low-cost, as they only required 44 black garbage bags, ~1000 pieces of black paper, and ~1000 pieces of white paper.
I visited a few homeroom classrooms as the activity was going on to take photos.
The homeroom teachers were all given a stack of black paper (about 30 pages) and printed copies of the bat outline on white paper (about 30 pages). Students used their own scissors and crayons to design their bats. Because this was a school-wide activity, the homeroom teachers were responsible for completing it inside their classes.
A 3rd grade homeroom teacher explaining how to cut out the bat shapes.
Third graders at work.
Lin Chenyu's (林宸玉) handiwork. (3rd grade).
(3rd grade).
The pastels looked great on the black paper! (3rd grade).
So cute! (1st grade).
Lovely blue and yellow bat with an overbite. (1st grade).
An especially batty bat, and with a face mask too! (1st grade).
Well drawn! (3rd grade).
She was so sweet! (3rd grade).
Apple (right) wrote her name on her bat! (3rd grade).
Gotta love the bowl haircut. Also, a very colorful bat! (3rd grade).
These two were silly (especially the student in the back). (3rd grade).
Mickey (back), 3rd grade.
She had a personal selection of bowtie stickers to choose from. (3rd grade).
This 3rd grade homeroom teacher was very festive and displayed her students' bats in the back of the classroom. Some students took their bats home.
Overall, the Halloween activities at both of my schools were vastly different -- in regards to their execution, the supplies needed, the reimbursement process (or lack thereof), the individuals responsible for leading the activity, and the content of the Halloween activities/lessons.
