I have been looking forward to this week for a while…possibly since before I even got to Kaohsiung.  The whole week was wholly dedicated to Halloween.  Actually we were so excited about this week, that the past two weeks were dedicated to preparing for this week!  ’Preparation’ included reading a story about a witch, learning Halloween vocab, and brainstorming how you could dress up for Halloween.  

But this week was the main event.  Since it was so big, I think I’m going to have to reserve two posts to cover the whole thing.  So here’s the break down of the first class: 

1. JellyBean counting contest: Whoever guesses the correct number (or closest number) of JellyBeans in one of the three containers gets to take the entire container home! (Sugar bribes never fail…although this doesn’t specifically encourage English, its still fun!)

2.  Halloween Mad Libs: students were broken into teams and then told to come up with 10 of the following kinds of words:

1. Type of weather (eg. cloudy)
2. Name of a town/city
3. Costume 1
4. Costume 2
5. Person
6. Question
7. Adjective
8. Place
9. Favorite food 1
10. Favorite food 2

Here are two of the more memorable results (words are bolded in the basic Mad Lib structure):

A: On a snow Halloween in the town of London, I was going to go trick-or-treating. I decided to dress up as a ghost but everyone thought I would scare people, so I decide to dress up as a spider instead. My spider costume was done to perfection and I looked great. The first door I knocked on turned out to be the home of Jolin Tsai. Jolin Tsai opened the door and said, “Is Tony (boy in the class) a girl?“. I tried to utter the words, “trick-or-treat” but I was very ugly. Jolin Tsai said, “Come in”. I said, “No way!” and ran as fast as I could for the W.C. I didn’t get any blood or poo-poo for Halloween that year.

B: On a windy Halloween in the town of Taipei, I was going to go trick-or-treating. I decided to dress up as a wizard but everyone thought I would scare people, so I decide to dress up as a ghost instead. My ghost costume was done to perfection and I looked great. The first door I knocked on turned out to be the home of Obama. Obama opened the door and said, “How many girlfriends do you have?“. I tried to utter the words, “trick-or-treat” but I was very excite.  Obama said, “Come in”. I said, “No way!” and ran as fast as I could for the beach (originally spelled ‘bitch’…causing about 3 minutes of confusion).  I didn’t get any shark or steak for Halloween that year.

 3. Mummy-wrapping:  What can be more fun than small Taiwanese children wrapped in toilet paper?  If you witnessed these classes, you would agree that not much could top it…in English class anyway.

Some teams were meticulous in their wrapping.

Others not so much...and if you look closely, you can actually identify some of these sadly-wrapped mummies.