Note from Thursday class

"In the dark dark wood, there is a dark dark house..."

Halloween season has arrived. We (kids and myself) started building up the spooky mood around our classroom. Some spooky decorations has been done and some would be added little by little till the Halloween Party day. This year, we will go on pumpkin hunting and a little tea party at the Sunny-field English garden. The menu for tea will be announced next week and we are inviting mums and dads for our tea party and would read a spooky story for them.

For the storytelling, we practiced to read a story, "In a Dark Dark House" together. Except one of kids, 10 year-old girl (one and the only girl) they enjoyed telling the story. This is a classic case of classroom management  issue but I can't change this universal fact: Girls grow up much faster than boys physically, mentally socially, even linguistically. In spite of the slight issue, the girl with no enthusiasm didn't bother me at all for she was rather funny to perform her part in a super low voice without any hint of smile. It was so ironic and hilarious that she was the best performer of all for the spooky and scary story. So, I gave her the scariest best performance award to her at the end and I detected a tiny hesitating adorable smile on her cranky face :-)

After the practice, we did an activity to put all the Halloween vocabularies into three groups with the representing titles such as food. I was thinking Food, Creature and Places but I got such a creative categories.
These are the voc: chocolate, graveyard, haunted house, vampire, candy, apple, pumpkin, mummy, skelton, wood, werewolf, witch,

Group A: Food, Realistic things, Unrealistic things.
Group B: Unmovable, Dead yet movable, Alive and movable,
Group C: Food, Movable, Unmovable,

5 min activity became such an interesting lesson because of the originality and creativity of their mind.
I was well impressed with those clever category.

Next week, we might be able to come up a story using some of words.

After the class, as I told this story to the little critic I got at home (my daughter). She said she could do better in English class at school if the textbook is a little bit more engaging...ummm....