Episode Transcript
Ixchell Reyes 0:00
Do you find yourself searching for Halloween ideas, but getting bored by the activities you find? If you want to avoid the real horror of coming up with your own ideas, we’ve got 13 scary ideas to use this Halloween.
Brent Warner 0:13
You welcome to the DIESOL podcast, where we focus on developing innovation in English as a second or other language. I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL at Irvine Valley College, and I’m here with the wonderful Ixchell Reyes, award winning educator and all sorts of scary things. We’re here back with our Halloween episode. Ixchell, how are you
Ixchell Reyes 0:45
Another halloween in the books?
Brent Warner 0:49
Well, yeah, this episode is kind of good, because a lot of times it comes out, like a few days before Halloween, or just the way the timing works. But this one, we’ve got a couple of weeks and so we’ve done these, like 13 scary things, right for the last four or five years, something like that. And now we’re going to do one, maybe changing pace a little bit, maybe kind of focusing on just some ideas you can bring into the classroom, mix things up a bit. And ishchell, I know you’ve got some some good ideas in this list. So are we ready? Do you want to tell any scary stories before we get started?
Ixchell Reyes 1:23
I want to avoid scary stories. Brent.
Brent Warner 1:27
Yeah, that’s why we didn’t go for the dark side (laughter) All right, so let’s keep it – Let’s just go with the keep it the spooky side of things, but not the real spooky side of things. You’re going to go first. Let’s jump into it.
Ixchell Reyes 1:43
All right. This is one of my favorites. This is a twist on what I call alphabet soup, but this one, it’s an icebreaker, icebreaker, a scary alphabet soup icebreaker. And this is a word building game. It teaches board study. So you start with a circle. You have everyone stand up, and a student will start with the letter A, the subsequent student with a B, and the goal is to get to the letter Z. And of course, there are some tricky letters, like X, like W, or like y, and sometimes z. So you, as a teacher, you sort of do have a little bit of pre planning to either tell them we’re not going to do a letter X anyway, you begin with nouns and verbs and adjectives to part to describe a particular word or topic. And I would for my students do this all the time, and they love it. So for this one, I’m probably going to do scary things. So I might start with Okay, things that are scary. Let’s start with nouns, maybe for a higher level class, I might say adjectives that describe a particular thing that’s scary. For example, quiz day, that’s a scary thing. All right, let’s start with words that describe quiz day. But here’s a twist. So the scary twist is if someone makes a mistake, so they give you a verb instead of a noun. Okay, they have to start from the beginning, and they cannot repeat any word that was previously said. Oh, okay. So that means that students, you’re increasing a little bit of the effective filter, but you’re also helping them to stay focused, because they need to be able to listen. A lot of the time, students are thinking, I’m letter H, I’m letter H, I’m letter H, but then someone messes up before they get to h, so when they get to that student, it’s like, Wait, are you listening? So and it’s kind of fun, they’ll all laugh at what ends up. I don’t like to make it a competition. I like to make it a collective group activity so someone can either keep track of the words on the board, or they can help each other when someone can’t come up with a word that way, it’s a collaborative effort and it it’s a community building icebreaker. Nice. Anyway, the goal is to win, and you win as a class if you get to the end, which is the letter Z or whatever, and you decide, as a teacher, will be dead cool.
Brent Warner 4:02
And so for Halloween, the themes might be something like, you know, like in things you find inside of a haunted house, or, you know, you know, food, scary food for the season, or, I don’t know, whatever. That’s not a good example, but something along those lines, and actually Ixchell your idea really, kind of ties very well in with my idea here, which is, I called it seance storytelling, right? So, the same idea, where people are sitting around in a circle, but in this case, what, the way that I had thought of it was they’re doing, you know, it’s like, pass the story around, like you give one sentence, or you give one or two sentences, and then the next person has to continue the story. But the way that I was thinking about it is, you would as a teacher, you would hand out different keywords or concepts. Maybe they’re just, you know, like a vocabulary word, or maybe it’s like, nebulous, yeah, or maybe it’s like a type of monster or something. Thing like that, like, okay, you’ve got a vampire, and now you’ve got a, you know, a graveyard, or whatever it is, right? And then when the story gets to each person, they have to keep telling the story until they can work in their element. And then it moves around the next, you know, the next seat at the seance, at the round seance table, so to speak, right? So, so just a storytelling, simple storytelling, but with a little bit of mix up in there, which is that you they have to achieve the, you know, the goal of hitting that particular vocabulary or concept and build it into their story as they’re going around the group. Okay?
Ixchell Reyes 5:35
And I love storytelling, just in general. All of these activities lend themselves to support in writing and reading and just vocabulary building. But Another fun activity is to to do onomatopoeia and sound words. And I’ve done them in many for many different areas, but but onomatopoeia for fire, for example, or for air, and I think it would be really fun to have students come up with lists or slides that they can present to the class on onomatopoeia sounds. And they can even go to YouTube and find them and find the words to describe them. Or they can pick a sound and then figure out how to describe it using onomatopoeia. And students love using onomatopoeia. Actually, the word itself, Onomatopoeia is so freaking scary. You try having them say it three times, and they still get tripped up on that. Oh
Brent Warner 6:29
yeah. Well, that, that one is good too. I mean, this one particularly lends itself to Halloween because of all the sound effects and the you know, like so if you’re playing a story, an audio book or something, or sounds for laughter, yeah. Yeah, right, cackling, yeah. So, so cackling. But then, but then also the opportunity there to talk about the difference between onomatopoeia and sound words, right? Which is like, because that one can be a little bit like, hey, is this a sound word? Is it onomatopoeia? Is it some kind of level of both? And they could get some nuanced breakdown as well, which is really fun and useful, I think.
Ixchell Reyes 7:03
And you know, one of my teachers who recently taught onomatopoeia for, I think it was for fire I forgot, or for air, or, yeah, I’m not sure which one she did, but she brought up a good point that onomatopoeia, you can really start to notice when an onomatopoeia word is being used in context, when you have subtitles playing in a movie, especially for for our language learners, they watch with subtitles, but they might see like sounds of fire cackling and that this is or something like that, and that’s where they can start to really see the word being used in context. Because where else are you going to see it listed? Right? You’re just going to hear the
Brent Warner 7:39
Whistling and whooshing through the trees. Right?
Ixchell Reyes 7:40
Exactly,
Brent Warner 7:42
Cool. So my next one is a if you’re doing a costume party in your class and you’re kind of like, hey, we just have things to do. One thing again, this more storytelling stuff, but is just randomly putting groups of students together to make an impromptu play, right? So if they’re going to go, you know, right on the spot, and it’s like, you’re going to be do a play, but they’re but their plays would then have to be related to each other through their costumes. So like, what’s happening when these different characters, or these different types of people start interacting with each other, and then that’s the base, so they’re already in the class, they’re already in their costumes, and then they just jump right into, you know, some sort of play. Obviously, you would have to set it up a little bit, but, but a pretty fun way to maybe do a couple of rounds of activities in a costume party class, where it’s not just, Hey, look at my costume, but it’s kind of more a little bit like showing it off, maybe kind of trying to get to some of the nuances or things that people might not notice about it if they just looked at you as compared to when you get a chance to interact with other people. So if you’re doing a costume party already, you can throw in some impromptu plays based on the costumes that they’re wearing. And then you could also mix them up and have them to go, okay, mix groups. And now you’re going to do, you know, they could also just do mingle activities where they have to kind of talk to each other as those characters as well.
Ixchell Reyes 9:06
Very cool. So the next one I have, I want to first give a shout out to Jessica pack. She’s a friend of the pod, yeah. And this came from her book movie making in the classroom. I happened to see her at ISTE, and I saw some of the student work, and that happened to be the I am poems. She had done a literature project with a Long Walk to Water about one of the Lost Boys in Sudan. And the follow up was an I am poem. But I think you could totally take that idea and do I am scary poems. And then you could have students, right? You could download, you know, download the template to an ion poem, which you can find on the internet anywhere,
Brent Warner 9:49
tell me what an I am poem is, again, ah,
Ixchell Reyes 9:51
so an ion poem is a poem where students are going to describe themselves, and it’s, there’s a repetition of the line, I am. Yeah, between stanzas. I think it’s like four stanzas that it has, and it uses verbs like I am, I pretend, I hope, I wish, and then they complete it according to whatever they decide they’re going to describe. It could be something to connect to themselves, or they could be writing from the perspective of another character. So I’ve had students write about, for example, one wrote about being Kurdish. So he wrote, I am Kurdish, and then subsequent lines about it, or I am John Lennon, subsequent lines about it, I am John Hamilton, etc. So for this one, you could do really anything. You could limit it if you have a lower level class, or you could write one as a class and assign a line of the poem. So I am a pumpkin, or I am Jack. Maybe Jack the Ripper is
Brent Warner 10:48
Jack Skellington.
Ixchell Reyes 10:52
Or how about, from the perspective of the Dog in what’s the name of the dog? 00, or coco. I am Coco. You could do a lot and again, you can have it again. The limit is what you make it. And also understand that in some cultures, this, this, this can get very deep for them and but this is a great activity to do as a class or individually. And at first, you know you’re you could have the students then narrate it themselves, which I thought, Oh, my students are going to fight me a little bit on this, because they’re very self conscious, which they really are and but they’re not. They wanted to narrate it and they wanted to send it and share it again. It just goes to show you that whatever they make, if they know they have a real audience and it’s personal, they’re going to be super proud, and they’re going to take so much time and effort and pour it into them. So again, thank you to Jessica pack out there. Activity is great. I am scary poems. Very cool, very cool.
Brent Warner 11:53
Okay, so mine is, this is less of an activity and more of a resource. But I don’t know if you’ve ever, like kind of tried to teach a little bit of the history of Halloween. It’s really quite tricky because, like, because the the origins are unclear and, you know? And it’s like, there’s so many different parts of it, and it’s like, did it come from this? Did it come from that? Right? But anyways, so one of the resources that I do like to use, the History Channel has a bunch of Halloween videos up on their website, and they actually will have one. It’s very short. I think it’s only like two or three minutes of, like, the history of Halloween. So kind of getting just a brief overview. I love it because you get an opportunity to kind of talk about the cultural, you know, the cultural background of it. Students tend to be pretty interested in, like, where did this come from? Why do people do all these things? And then history channel also has like, a bunch of related videos. So like, history of trick or treating, why do ghosts wear white sheets? History of the jack o lantern, you know? And they’re all short. They’re, they’re, you know, none of them are over, you know, too long. And so if you wanted to get some good resources that are, that are pretty solid. The History Channel has quite a few, and you can use those to launch any number of activities, all right, so we need onomatopoeia. Don’t worry. And everybody else has already heard this, except for you. Ishchell, is that? Oh, we are using scary sound effects too. Okay, so just quick break. We mentioned this on the last show. If you’re going to the TESOL virtual convention on November 21 and 22nd you can use my code, B, WVC, 2025, so I think that’s Brent Warner virtual convention 2025 as we determined last time. But you can get, I think, 20% off the tickets if you buy it before, before Halloween ends. I think you can get it for a pretty good rate, and then it goes up like 100 bucks. So you can still get the 20 bucks off or 20% off, but it would go up quite a bit. So order soon. If you’re planning on going, I will see you there.
Ixchell Reyes 14:03
And with all that money you’ll be saving, you could buy us a coffee. That’s not so scary. It’s just a little bit of savings, and you can just throw it our way so we can stay caffeinated and awake
Brent Warner 14:16
and keep the show running. The show running. If it’s if it’s useful for you, we love
Ixchell Reyes 14:21
it all right, so for those of you who may have higher academic level classes, I love, love, love, love doing academic listenings on lots of relevant topics, and one that I found that is So awesome for Halloween is the science of fear, and it’s from the hidden brain podcast. And so you introduce the concept of haunted houses and escape houses, for example, not all countries have them, and not all students may be familiar with it. But why do people like to go to these. Places like, why do they like that? What is it about that thrill? There’s an actual science behind it, and there is an episode that’s chock full of really interesting ideas and excellent vocabulary and phrases that your students can listen for. And so I’ve created a Critical Thinking Worksheet that I use with my high level classes and again. Then that makes it also introduces the the fact that if you’re looking for a first date and you’re looking to bond a little bit more on that first date, take your date to a scary place. Scare the crap. No, because you could be the person who’s like, I’ll protect you.
Brent Warner 15:40
So you’re not saying, like, on a first date, you like machete and you like want to go out in a cornfield. Well, that’s all
Ixchell Reyes 15:50
right. Anyway, you’ll learn about the galvanic
Brent Warner 15:52
my wife responds to it good, by the way, the link to the show in the show notes and you show will you share your activity
Ixchell Reyes 16:04
sheet? Absolutely, absolutely. You can download it. Use loser, edit, cool,
Brent Warner 16:08
cool. All right, so my next one then is, is telling a scary story. But I think that a lot of times, students have a good opportunity here to translate a story from their own culture, right? Everybody has their own scary stories. They kind of have their own, like, ways of talking about how monsters look and how they how they interact fear and fear and all those things and so. So this can be, actually a good opportunity for them to share some of their culture while integrating it into, you know, you know, the the English speaking culture and so translate and tell a scary story. I also have a slide deck that I use I built a year or two ago, I think, with my for my conversation class, just kind of about the aspects of it. So like talking about things like settings and characters and conflict and climax and resolution. So actually getting in some storytelling, storytelling skills as you’re going through it. And then I have a, I have a worksheet for that as well, and I’ll share, I’ll share both of those in the show notes. But if you wanted to do it your own way, that’s totally fine, but if you wanted to kind of have a little starter kit there telling a scary story, and having students kind of tell their own is a good way to do it cool.
Ixchell Reyes 17:20
So another cool word activity is Word Ladder, but then only doing scary word letters. And I’m not sure if you know Brent what a Word Ladder is. I don’t remember. Yeah, in elementary school, you tend to do a lot of these because students are are learning new vocabulary. But it’s, it’s as a puzzle. So it keeps students motivated. So you start off with the letter at a board at the top and a word at the bottom, and you’re essentially climbing a letter a ladder rung in between to get to the final word, and each rung of the ladder is going to have a clue about the next word using the letters from the previous word. So let’s say you start one letter or something. It depends. Most of the really challenging one is you change one letter. But we’re working with language learners, so you might actually tell them you change three letters, or you use the same letters but rearrange them. So you want to maybe, if you’re making your own, you want to think of that ahead of time, the ones that are created for children, they usually don’t stick to the change only one letter, because that’s maybe too challenging. It assumes that they already know the word, and many times they might not know the word. For example, in I recently did one on back to school, and one of the words was jock. Okay? And my students would have never known the word jock. So I had to sort of say, Look, this is what a jock is, and this
Brent Warner 18:45
is why it says your Halloween costume this year.
Ixchell Reyes 18:49
So again, you want to you could, you could. There are some already that are out there that teachers have made and just look up Halloween word letters, and a lot of them are going to have onomatopoeia. I had a recent one. The one I did in class had the word at the end was the thing that that ghosts yell out. And of course, they don’t yell out Boo in all the languages, by the way. So one of my students had seen the signs all over the school house with like ghosts yelling boo. So he said, Oh, boo. And in his country, they don’t yell boo. So that was kind of a cool thing. And again, students will say, Oh, I didn’t know that word. Oh, I didn’t know that word. Again, they’re simple words, but you’re building your vocabulary so scary word letters. And you could also ask AI to build one for you, but you will have to go in and check that it works and that the words are words you want included,
Brent Warner 19:42
but I was thinking that too, AI would be a great resource. Just like, hey, build build me out an answer key, and then I’ll backwards and design it for my class. Perfect. Yeah, by the way, just quick, quick question here that those scary words in other languages. Do you have any other like the way to say boo in other languages? Do have one you like?
Ixchell Reyes 20:01
Yeah. And one of them, I think it was like, Ouuuh
Brent Warner 20:03
Yeah, Japanese is like, “wah!”, right?
Ixchell Reyes 20:05
Yeah, you’re right. And so again, another chance for your students to talk about their cultures and bond over something like Halloween. If they don’t practice Halloween.
Brent Warner 20:19
Yeah. So, speaking of maybe ways to use AI. You and Ixchell, we do lots of presentations and conversations around the image generation and language learning, and so I was thinking it’d be a fun one to do, using AI to draw different body parts. So it’s like, you’re gonna describe what looks like, yeah, like, and it might be a monster’s hat. And then another person draws like, what kind of what does the arm look like, or what does the body of the torso and like? And so they you, each person would go in with their own descriptive language to create a body part. And then if you go into something like Adobe Express or Canva, you can go in and upload that picture, and then remove the background, and then you can link all the pictures together, right? So all the students could then create their own I called it the fur Aiken Stein Frankenstein monster because, of course, you have to use AI every time you’re you have to link it into the word somehow. But anyways, you know, you could have like, four or five different students all working on the same thing. They’re each of them are describing a different part, and then you put it together, and then they could kind of have a more, bigger description thing. So it might be good for like, intermediate level students who want to play around with some stuff, have a little bit of fun, and then make some classroom monsters at the same time. And you know what I bet you could do? I just thought about, I photos. AI photos, yeah, well, you could. You could then probably take that combined photo and put it into one of those animators, right? Because now, like, creepy, yeah. So then it would be like, get this, get this monster to move around. Like, if you up, you know, if you put it into Sora or one of the video creators and said, use this as your context, right? That could be really interesting for, for, you know, next premise of the next activity.
Ixchell Reyes 22:03
And just I’m wondering, do you have any off the top animators that you use or that you might suggest?
Brent Warner 22:09
No, I just thought of it as I was talking about it. So I’m not 100% sure, but, but, you know, my my first, although I hate to suggest it, my first one, just because Sora is going so, so crazy right now with everything, but I’m sure there are other ones out there. And actually, my guess is that maybe even Adobe has something that lets you do something similar. Some of them have ones where it’s like, you can kind of define the head and the nail and the, you know, body parts, and it’ll move things around for you. So if I could find more, I’ll add it to the show notes.
Ixchell Reyes 22:41
Very, very cool. Okay, another writing activity. This will not scare your students. This is a scary diamante poems. And if you’re not familiar with the amante poems, there are poems developed for vocabulary awareness in the shape of a diamond. So the idea is that every line of the poem is designated by the line will say something like start with a noun, add two adjectives and three gerunds to describe this noun. But by the time you get to the bottom of the diamond, you’ve now either done a synonym poem or an antonym poem. So if you start with fall, you might end with autumn. If you start with fall, you might end with winter or something like that. I don’t know it’s fall into my spring, for example, but you could do Halloween diamante poems, and you could either build one as a class for to start off as an example, and then give students pieces of paper, little squares in which they could write their own poems. And I’ve had some great ones, and I just thought, well, this is a great way to get your students excited about writing, and also using words like the onomatopoeia, right, or using adjectives that they may not normally be able to use because of the nature of the assignment. So I recently had a student who was like, Yes, I can use nebulous. I’ve been dying to use nebulous and and again, but it helps them to and of course, they’re going to look up synonyms and but they’re going to be careful about what they want to use. And that’s what I think the goal of of the activity is get them to think about the words they’re using, and then display them. That’s the best. And if you can’t display them, choose one out of a, I don’t know, a halloween bag to read, or everybody reads one, or they can read their own. But they love this activity. So the amante poems, if you just look them up, you’ll see a bunch of templates that are everywhere. But turn them into scary. Diamante poems, nice,
Brent Warner 24:42
very cool. Okay, so I think kind of connected to that and the writing maybe, maybe this be reading again. This is more just a resource, and you might want to play around with ways that you would want to use it. But my friend recently sent me a couple of texts, and he’s like, Hey, man, I’ve been working on these 100 word horror stories. Stories, right? And I’m like, the first thing, I was like, Oh my God, that’s so hard to do, because, like, writing, writing a scary story that you know connects in in less than 100 words, or 100 words or less, like that, is a challenge. But then he’s like, Oh yeah, I’m going to try and submit him to some of these anthologies. So anyways, there’s this book called 100 word horrors, an anthology of horror drabbles And so, yeah, cool title, right? But the, you know, it’s just a bunch of different scary stories that are really short and really, you know, easy to access. Obviously, you’d have to check out for your level, whether or not it’s appropriate for your students, but, these things exist out there, right? And then you could present them to the students, share them, you know, share, share this idea. And again, you know, of course, you could get AI to do it. But what a great thing to get other people’s real creations right in this case. And so you could share a couple of these stories. Use them either as reading activities. You could use them as launch pads for writing activities where students are encouraged to write their own short stories or quick stories, all sorts of different things. So if you’re interested, and it’s got a cool cover, I don’t know ishchell, if you see this link on here, but the the the actual book covers really kind of this cool old fashioned like, you know, King Kong smashing buildings and looks like an old fashioned horror poster kind of thing. So check it out. 100 word horrors, an anthology of horror travels. It’s
Ixchell Reyes 26:28
just, it’s a cool book to have just on display because someone’s gonna want to pick it up. They’re gonna recognize King Kong. Last but not least is my Halloween idioms challenge. That’s what I call it. And you could pre select idioms, depending on the level of your class and the time you have allotted, but you could pre select idioms, assign them to a student, or have students find one for my students are lower level, so I always have to limit it, and I have to pre select but you give them an idiom, have them research it, understand it, be able to teach it. And then you assign them a slide on Google Slides, which they can now fix the layout and and, you know, add whatever they want on on it. And then you can have them present it to the class. Students love to do this, and they love to try to use it in context. So as a follow up activity, you could create a quiz ahead of time if you know what idioms they have, and you can have them do some kind of class competition. You could alternatively turn this into a storytelling segment and ask the students to write their own paragraph if they’re that level or sentences. My students love to write sentences. So I keep just little random strips of paper all throughout the room, because at any given moment, my students will say, Oh, here, let me write a sentence in context, and I want to show it to you. So if you have it available, I found this term, they will use it, and students will randomly say, Here, write a sentence. And that’s, again, not something you can always get with digital devices, but the paper itself invites them to write. And then, of course, you can post them around the room. You could have a snowball fight, throw them, and someone picks one up and reads it out loud, something like this. And then guess who wrote it? So Halloween idioms, challenge.
Brent Warner 28:17
Awesome – So that is 13 scary ideas for things you can bring into the classroom
Ixchell Reyes 28:25
And if you do have some scary results to share, botched results are always fun too, right?
Brent Warner 28:35
Yeah, you can always drop your own extra ideas into into the episode at DIESOL.org/128
Ixchell Reyes 28:50
All right, it is time for our fun finds. And as we’re talking about Halloween, you may have been booed, which means someone gave you a little bag of goodies with a little ghost that says you’ve been booed, please spread what chilly awareness, or chili Joy, I don’t know, whatever, to two colleagues. Find a little bag and stuff it with goodies, and don’t let them know it’s you, so that you can keep the mystery going. So if you’ve been booed, or if you’re thinking, you still have time to boo a few people, you can find all of the things you need from I think it’s you’ve been booed.com or just search you’ve been booed. But essentially, sometimes it’s, I’m not a creative person when it comes to filling up a bag of goodies. So I did find for my my mystery people. I i found little ghost squishy, like squishy stress relief toys from Target. And I thought, oh, that’s kind of fun. And also you can use it if you want to keep it in the classroom. You could keep it in the classroom, but they’re just, I think, like $3 squishy ghosts from Target. And once you click on that, you can get other ideas for what to put in your food cue. Bag, your goat bag, nice.
Brent Warner 30:04
All right, so mine is, I kind of don’t like sharing this one, but I’ll, in a sense, because it’s kind of a fast fashion thing, but you can get these cheap skeleton cardigans, right? It’s like a affordable, affordable skeleton cardigan. It’s like 30 bucks or something, 25 bucks. That affordable? Well, it’s, it’s, whatever it’s, but it’s, it’s not like the 150 or $200 like fancy ones, right? So you can get these, these cardigans, and I have a link to one, right? But I just like it as an easy backup costume, because a lot of times we get busy and forget, and it’s like, oh, there’s something to do. And it’s like, okay, and some places don’t allow costumes, yeah, a lot of places, like no masks or all sorts of things. But it’s just like, hey, you can throw this on and you can keep it for a bunch of years, right, and just kind of tuck it away, and then when Halloween season comes out, you pull it out if you need it for a certain day or for a quick event when you’re not really totally prepared to do a full on costume, just a fun little skeleton cardigan, you know, easy to wear and easy to throw on on top of some black clothes or whatever else you got going. So that’s my fun.
Ixchell Reyes 31:03
Find alright for the show notes and other episodes, check out DIESOL.org/ 128 you can find us on most platforms, YouTube, Facebook or Instagram, at @DIESOLpod.
Brent Warner 31:18
You can find me on most of the platforms, at @BrentGWarner,
Ixchell Reyes 31:22
and you can find me at IXY Underscore, PIXY Underscore.That’s @ixy_pixy_
Brent Warner 31:30
All right, What’s scary way to say goodbye. You should die for listening to the DIESOL PODCAST!!!
Ixchell Reyes 31:41
No! “it’s a dead end after this one”.
Brent Warner 31:44
Oh, there we go.
Ixchell Reyes 31:44
Or Dead silence.
Brent Warner 31:46
Dead silence.
Do you find yourself searching for Halloween ideas, but getting bored by the activities you find? If you want to avoid the real horror of coming up with your own ideas, we’ve got 13 scary ideas to use this Halloween.
Brent Warner 0:13
You welcome to the DIESOL podcast, where we focus on developing innovation in English as a second or other language. I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL at Irvine Valley College, and I’m here with the wonderful Ixchell Reyes, award winning educator and all sorts of scary things. We’re here back with our Halloween episode. Ixchell, how are you
Ixchell Reyes 0:45
Another halloween in the books?
Brent Warner 0:49
Well, yeah, this episode is kind of good, because a lot of times it comes out, like a few days before Halloween, or just the way the timing works. But this one, we’ve got a couple of weeks and so we’ve done these, like 13 scary things, right for the last four or five years, something like that. And now we’re going to do one, maybe changing pace a little bit, maybe kind of focusing on just some ideas you can bring into the classroom, mix things up a bit. And ishchell, I know you’ve got some some good ideas in this list. So are we ready? Do you want to tell any scary stories before we get started?
Ixchell Reyes 1:23
I want to avoid scary stories. Brent.
Brent Warner 1:27
Yeah, that’s why we didn’t go for the dark side (laughter) All right, so let’s keep it – Let’s just go with the keep it the spooky side of things, but not the real spooky side of things. You’re going to go first. Let’s jump into it.
Ixchell Reyes 1:43
All right. This is one of my favorites. This is a twist on what I call alphabet soup, but this one, it’s an icebreaker, icebreaker, a scary alphabet soup icebreaker. And this is a word building game. It teaches board study. So you start with a circle. You have everyone stand up, and a student will start with the letter A, the subsequent student with a B, and the goal is to get to the letter Z. And of course, there are some tricky letters, like X, like W, or like y, and sometimes z. So you, as a teacher, you sort of do have a little bit of pre planning to either tell them we’re not going to do a letter X anyway, you begin with nouns and verbs and adjectives to part to describe a particular word or topic. And I would for my students do this all the time, and they love it. So for this one, I’m probably going to do scary things. So I might start with Okay, things that are scary. Let’s start with nouns, maybe for a higher level class, I might say adjectives that describe a particular thing that’s scary. For example, quiz day, that’s a scary thing. All right, let’s start with words that describe quiz day. But here’s a twist. So the scary twist is if someone makes a mistake, so they give you a verb instead of a noun. Okay, they have to start from the beginning, and they cannot repeat any word that was previously said. Oh, okay. So that means that students, you’re increasing a little bit of the effective filter, but you’re also helping them to stay focused, because they need to be able to listen. A lot of the time, students are thinking, I’m letter H, I’m letter H, I’m letter H, but then someone messes up before they get to h, so when they get to that student, it’s like, Wait, are you listening? So and it’s kind of fun, they’ll all laugh at what ends up. I don’t like to make it a competition. I like to make it a collective group activity so someone can either keep track of the words on the board, or they can help each other when someone can’t come up with a word that way, it’s a collaborative effort and it it’s a community building icebreaker. Nice. Anyway, the goal is to win, and you win as a class if you get to the end, which is the letter Z or whatever, and you decide, as a teacher, will be dead cool.
Brent Warner 4:02
And so for Halloween, the themes might be something like, you know, like in things you find inside of a haunted house, or, you know, you know, food, scary food for the season, or, I don’t know, whatever. That’s not a good example, but something along those lines, and actually Ixchell your idea really, kind of ties very well in with my idea here, which is, I called it seance storytelling, right? So, the same idea, where people are sitting around in a circle, but in this case, what, the way that I had thought of it was they’re doing, you know, it’s like, pass the story around, like you give one sentence, or you give one or two sentences, and then the next person has to continue the story. But the way that I was thinking about it is, you would as a teacher, you would hand out different keywords or concepts. Maybe they’re just, you know, like a vocabulary word, or maybe it’s like, nebulous, yeah, or maybe it’s like a type of monster or something. Thing like that, like, okay, you’ve got a vampire, and now you’ve got a, you know, a graveyard, or whatever it is, right? And then when the story gets to each person, they have to keep telling the story until they can work in their element. And then it moves around the next, you know, the next seat at the seance, at the round seance table, so to speak, right? So, so just a storytelling, simple storytelling, but with a little bit of mix up in there, which is that you they have to achieve the, you know, the goal of hitting that particular vocabulary or concept and build it into their story as they’re going around the group. Okay?
Ixchell Reyes 5:35
And I love storytelling, just in general. All of these activities lend themselves to support in writing and reading and just vocabulary building. But Another fun activity is to to do onomatopoeia and sound words. And I’ve done them in many for many different areas, but but onomatopoeia for fire, for example, or for air, and I think it would be really fun to have students come up with lists or slides that they can present to the class on onomatopoeia sounds. And they can even go to YouTube and find them and find the words to describe them. Or they can pick a sound and then figure out how to describe it using onomatopoeia. And students love using onomatopoeia. Actually, the word itself, Onomatopoeia is so freaking scary. You try having them say it three times, and they still get tripped up on that. Oh
Brent Warner 6:29
yeah. Well, that, that one is good too. I mean, this one particularly lends itself to Halloween because of all the sound effects and the you know, like so if you’re playing a story, an audio book or something, or sounds for laughter, yeah. Yeah, right, cackling, yeah. So, so cackling. But then, but then also the opportunity there to talk about the difference between onomatopoeia and sound words, right? Which is like, because that one can be a little bit like, hey, is this a sound word? Is it onomatopoeia? Is it some kind of level of both? And they could get some nuanced breakdown as well, which is really fun and useful, I think.
Ixchell Reyes 7:03
And you know, one of my teachers who recently taught onomatopoeia for, I think it was for fire I forgot, or for air, or, yeah, I’m not sure which one she did, but she brought up a good point that onomatopoeia, you can really start to notice when an onomatopoeia word is being used in context, when you have subtitles playing in a movie, especially for for our language learners, they watch with subtitles, but they might see like sounds of fire cackling and that this is or something like that, and that’s where they can start to really see the word being used in context. Because where else are you going to see it listed? Right? You’re just going to hear the
Brent Warner 7:39
Whistling and whooshing through the trees. Right?
Ixchell Reyes 7:40
Exactly,
Brent Warner 7:42
Cool. So my next one is a if you’re doing a costume party in your class and you’re kind of like, hey, we just have things to do. One thing again, this more storytelling stuff, but is just randomly putting groups of students together to make an impromptu play, right? So if they’re going to go, you know, right on the spot, and it’s like, you’re going to be do a play, but they’re but their plays would then have to be related to each other through their costumes. So like, what’s happening when these different characters, or these different types of people start interacting with each other, and then that’s the base, so they’re already in the class, they’re already in their costumes, and then they just jump right into, you know, some sort of play. Obviously, you would have to set it up a little bit, but, but a pretty fun way to maybe do a couple of rounds of activities in a costume party class, where it’s not just, Hey, look at my costume, but it’s kind of more a little bit like showing it off, maybe kind of trying to get to some of the nuances or things that people might not notice about it if they just looked at you as compared to when you get a chance to interact with other people. So if you’re doing a costume party already, you can throw in some impromptu plays based on the costumes that they’re wearing. And then you could also mix them up and have them to go, okay, mix groups. And now you’re going to do, you know, they could also just do mingle activities where they have to kind of talk to each other as those characters as well.
Ixchell Reyes 9:06
Very cool. So the next one I have, I want to first give a shout out to Jessica pack. She’s a friend of the pod, yeah. And this came from her book movie making in the classroom. I happened to see her at ISTE, and I saw some of the student work, and that happened to be the I am poems. She had done a literature project with a Long Walk to Water about one of the Lost Boys in Sudan. And the follow up was an I am poem. But I think you could totally take that idea and do I am scary poems. And then you could have students, right? You could download, you know, download the template to an ion poem, which you can find on the internet anywhere,
Brent Warner 9:49
tell me what an I am poem is, again, ah,
Ixchell Reyes 9:51
so an ion poem is a poem where students are going to describe themselves, and it’s, there’s a repetition of the line, I am. Yeah, between stanzas. I think it’s like four stanzas that it has, and it uses verbs like I am, I pretend, I hope, I wish, and then they complete it according to whatever they decide they’re going to describe. It could be something to connect to themselves, or they could be writing from the perspective of another character. So I’ve had students write about, for example, one wrote about being Kurdish. So he wrote, I am Kurdish, and then subsequent lines about it, or I am John Lennon, subsequent lines about it, I am John Hamilton, etc. So for this one, you could do really anything. You could limit it if you have a lower level class, or you could write one as a class and assign a line of the poem. So I am a pumpkin, or I am Jack. Maybe Jack the Ripper is
Brent Warner 10:48
Jack Skellington.
Ixchell Reyes 10:52
Or how about, from the perspective of the Dog in what’s the name of the dog? 00, or coco. I am Coco. You could do a lot and again, you can have it again. The limit is what you make it. And also understand that in some cultures, this, this, this can get very deep for them and but this is a great activity to do as a class or individually. And at first, you know you’re you could have the students then narrate it themselves, which I thought, Oh, my students are going to fight me a little bit on this, because they’re very self conscious, which they really are and but they’re not. They wanted to narrate it and they wanted to send it and share it again. It just goes to show you that whatever they make, if they know they have a real audience and it’s personal, they’re going to be super proud, and they’re going to take so much time and effort and pour it into them. So again, thank you to Jessica pack out there. Activity is great. I am scary poems. Very cool, very cool.
Brent Warner 11:53
Okay, so mine is, this is less of an activity and more of a resource. But I don’t know if you’ve ever, like kind of tried to teach a little bit of the history of Halloween. It’s really quite tricky because, like, because the the origins are unclear and, you know? And it’s like, there’s so many different parts of it, and it’s like, did it come from this? Did it come from that? Right? But anyways, so one of the resources that I do like to use, the History Channel has a bunch of Halloween videos up on their website, and they actually will have one. It’s very short. I think it’s only like two or three minutes of, like, the history of Halloween. So kind of getting just a brief overview. I love it because you get an opportunity to kind of talk about the cultural, you know, the cultural background of it. Students tend to be pretty interested in, like, where did this come from? Why do people do all these things? And then history channel also has like, a bunch of related videos. So like, history of trick or treating, why do ghosts wear white sheets? History of the jack o lantern, you know? And they’re all short. They’re, they’re, you know, none of them are over, you know, too long. And so if you wanted to get some good resources that are, that are pretty solid. The History Channel has quite a few, and you can use those to launch any number of activities, all right, so we need onomatopoeia. Don’t worry. And everybody else has already heard this, except for you. Ishchell, is that? Oh, we are using scary sound effects too. Okay, so just quick break. We mentioned this on the last show. If you’re going to the TESOL virtual convention on November 21 and 22nd you can use my code, B, WVC, 2025, so I think that’s Brent Warner virtual convention 2025 as we determined last time. But you can get, I think, 20% off the tickets if you buy it before, before Halloween ends. I think you can get it for a pretty good rate, and then it goes up like 100 bucks. So you can still get the 20 bucks off or 20% off, but it would go up quite a bit. So order soon. If you’re planning on going, I will see you there.
Ixchell Reyes 14:03
And with all that money you’ll be saving, you could buy us a coffee. That’s not so scary. It’s just a little bit of savings, and you can just throw it our way so we can stay caffeinated and awake
Brent Warner 14:16
and keep the show running. The show running. If it’s if it’s useful for you, we love
Ixchell Reyes 14:21
it all right, so for those of you who may have higher academic level classes, I love, love, love, love doing academic listenings on lots of relevant topics, and one that I found that is So awesome for Halloween is the science of fear, and it’s from the hidden brain podcast. And so you introduce the concept of haunted houses and escape houses, for example, not all countries have them, and not all students may be familiar with it. But why do people like to go to these. Places like, why do they like that? What is it about that thrill? There’s an actual science behind it, and there is an episode that’s chock full of really interesting ideas and excellent vocabulary and phrases that your students can listen for. And so I’ve created a Critical Thinking Worksheet that I use with my high level classes and again. Then that makes it also introduces the the fact that if you’re looking for a first date and you’re looking to bond a little bit more on that first date, take your date to a scary place. Scare the crap. No, because you could be the person who’s like, I’ll protect you.
Brent Warner 15:40
So you’re not saying, like, on a first date, you like machete and you like want to go out in a cornfield. Well, that’s all
Ixchell Reyes 15:50
right. Anyway, you’ll learn about the galvanic
Brent Warner 15:52
my wife responds to it good, by the way, the link to the show in the show notes and you show will you share your activity
Ixchell Reyes 16:04
sheet? Absolutely, absolutely. You can download it. Use loser, edit, cool,
Brent Warner 16:08
cool. All right, so my next one then is, is telling a scary story. But I think that a lot of times, students have a good opportunity here to translate a story from their own culture, right? Everybody has their own scary stories. They kind of have their own, like, ways of talking about how monsters look and how they how they interact fear and fear and all those things and so. So this can be, actually a good opportunity for them to share some of their culture while integrating it into, you know, you know, the the English speaking culture and so translate and tell a scary story. I also have a slide deck that I use I built a year or two ago, I think, with my for my conversation class, just kind of about the aspects of it. So like talking about things like settings and characters and conflict and climax and resolution. So actually getting in some storytelling, storytelling skills as you’re going through it. And then I have a, I have a worksheet for that as well, and I’ll share, I’ll share both of those in the show notes. But if you wanted to do it your own way, that’s totally fine, but if you wanted to kind of have a little starter kit there telling a scary story, and having students kind of tell their own is a good way to do it cool.
Ixchell Reyes 17:20
So another cool word activity is Word Ladder, but then only doing scary word letters. And I’m not sure if you know Brent what a Word Ladder is. I don’t remember. Yeah, in elementary school, you tend to do a lot of these because students are are learning new vocabulary. But it’s, it’s as a puzzle. So it keeps students motivated. So you start off with the letter at a board at the top and a word at the bottom, and you’re essentially climbing a letter a ladder rung in between to get to the final word, and each rung of the ladder is going to have a clue about the next word using the letters from the previous word. So let’s say you start one letter or something. It depends. Most of the really challenging one is you change one letter. But we’re working with language learners, so you might actually tell them you change three letters, or you use the same letters but rearrange them. So you want to maybe, if you’re making your own, you want to think of that ahead of time, the ones that are created for children, they usually don’t stick to the change only one letter, because that’s maybe too challenging. It assumes that they already know the word, and many times they might not know the word. For example, in I recently did one on back to school, and one of the words was jock. Okay? And my students would have never known the word jock. So I had to sort of say, Look, this is what a jock is, and this
Brent Warner 18:45
is why it says your Halloween costume this year.
Ixchell Reyes 18:49
So again, you want to you could, you could. There are some already that are out there that teachers have made and just look up Halloween word letters, and a lot of them are going to have onomatopoeia. I had a recent one. The one I did in class had the word at the end was the thing that that ghosts yell out. And of course, they don’t yell out Boo in all the languages, by the way. So one of my students had seen the signs all over the school house with like ghosts yelling boo. So he said, Oh, boo. And in his country, they don’t yell boo. So that was kind of a cool thing. And again, students will say, Oh, I didn’t know that word. Oh, I didn’t know that word. Again, they’re simple words, but you’re building your vocabulary so scary word letters. And you could also ask AI to build one for you, but you will have to go in and check that it works and that the words are words you want included,
Brent Warner 19:42
but I was thinking that too, AI would be a great resource. Just like, hey, build build me out an answer key, and then I’ll backwards and design it for my class. Perfect. Yeah, by the way, just quick, quick question here that those scary words in other languages. Do you have any other like the way to say boo in other languages? Do have one you like?
Ixchell Reyes 20:01
Yeah. And one of them, I think it was like, Ouuuh
Brent Warner 20:03
Yeah, Japanese is like, “wah!”, right?
Ixchell Reyes 20:05
Yeah, you’re right. And so again, another chance for your students to talk about their cultures and bond over something like Halloween. If they don’t practice Halloween.
Brent Warner 20:19
Yeah. So, speaking of maybe ways to use AI. You and Ixchell, we do lots of presentations and conversations around the image generation and language learning, and so I was thinking it’d be a fun one to do, using AI to draw different body parts. So it’s like, you’re gonna describe what looks like, yeah, like, and it might be a monster’s hat. And then another person draws like, what kind of what does the arm look like, or what does the body of the torso and like? And so they you, each person would go in with their own descriptive language to create a body part. And then if you go into something like Adobe Express or Canva, you can go in and upload that picture, and then remove the background, and then you can link all the pictures together, right? So all the students could then create their own I called it the fur Aiken Stein Frankenstein monster because, of course, you have to use AI every time you’re you have to link it into the word somehow. But anyways, you know, you could have like, four or five different students all working on the same thing. They’re each of them are describing a different part, and then you put it together, and then they could kind of have a more, bigger description thing. So it might be good for like, intermediate level students who want to play around with some stuff, have a little bit of fun, and then make some classroom monsters at the same time. And you know what I bet you could do? I just thought about, I photos. AI photos, yeah, well, you could. You could then probably take that combined photo and put it into one of those animators, right? Because now, like, creepy, yeah. So then it would be like, get this, get this monster to move around. Like, if you up, you know, if you put it into Sora or one of the video creators and said, use this as your context, right? That could be really interesting for, for, you know, next premise of the next activity.
Ixchell Reyes 22:03
And just I’m wondering, do you have any off the top animators that you use or that you might suggest?
Brent Warner 22:09
No, I just thought of it as I was talking about it. So I’m not 100% sure, but, but, you know, my my first, although I hate to suggest it, my first one, just because Sora is going so, so crazy right now with everything, but I’m sure there are other ones out there. And actually, my guess is that maybe even Adobe has something that lets you do something similar. Some of them have ones where it’s like, you can kind of define the head and the nail and the, you know, body parts, and it’ll move things around for you. So if I could find more, I’ll add it to the show notes.
Ixchell Reyes 22:41
Very, very cool. Okay, another writing activity. This will not scare your students. This is a scary diamante poems. And if you’re not familiar with the amante poems, there are poems developed for vocabulary awareness in the shape of a diamond. So the idea is that every line of the poem is designated by the line will say something like start with a noun, add two adjectives and three gerunds to describe this noun. But by the time you get to the bottom of the diamond, you’ve now either done a synonym poem or an antonym poem. So if you start with fall, you might end with autumn. If you start with fall, you might end with winter or something like that. I don’t know it’s fall into my spring, for example, but you could do Halloween diamante poems, and you could either build one as a class for to start off as an example, and then give students pieces of paper, little squares in which they could write their own poems. And I’ve had some great ones, and I just thought, well, this is a great way to get your students excited about writing, and also using words like the onomatopoeia, right, or using adjectives that they may not normally be able to use because of the nature of the assignment. So I recently had a student who was like, Yes, I can use nebulous. I’ve been dying to use nebulous and and again, but it helps them to and of course, they’re going to look up synonyms and but they’re going to be careful about what they want to use. And that’s what I think the goal of of the activity is get them to think about the words they’re using, and then display them. That’s the best. And if you can’t display them, choose one out of a, I don’t know, a halloween bag to read, or everybody reads one, or they can read their own. But they love this activity. So the amante poems, if you just look them up, you’ll see a bunch of templates that are everywhere. But turn them into scary. Diamante poems, nice,
Brent Warner 24:42
very cool. Okay, so I think kind of connected to that and the writing maybe, maybe this be reading again. This is more just a resource, and you might want to play around with ways that you would want to use it. But my friend recently sent me a couple of texts, and he’s like, Hey, man, I’ve been working on these 100 word horror stories. Stories, right? And I’m like, the first thing, I was like, Oh my God, that’s so hard to do, because, like, writing, writing a scary story that you know connects in in less than 100 words, or 100 words or less, like that, is a challenge. But then he’s like, Oh yeah, I’m going to try and submit him to some of these anthologies. So anyways, there’s this book called 100 word horrors, an anthology of horror drabbles And so, yeah, cool title, right? But the, you know, it’s just a bunch of different scary stories that are really short and really, you know, easy to access. Obviously, you’d have to check out for your level, whether or not it’s appropriate for your students, but, these things exist out there, right? And then you could present them to the students, share them, you know, share, share this idea. And again, you know, of course, you could get AI to do it. But what a great thing to get other people’s real creations right in this case. And so you could share a couple of these stories. Use them either as reading activities. You could use them as launch pads for writing activities where students are encouraged to write their own short stories or quick stories, all sorts of different things. So if you’re interested, and it’s got a cool cover, I don’t know ishchell, if you see this link on here, but the the the actual book covers really kind of this cool old fashioned like, you know, King Kong smashing buildings and looks like an old fashioned horror poster kind of thing. So check it out. 100 word horrors, an anthology of horror travels. It’s
Ixchell Reyes 26:28
just, it’s a cool book to have just on display because someone’s gonna want to pick it up. They’re gonna recognize King Kong. Last but not least is my Halloween idioms challenge. That’s what I call it. And you could pre select idioms, depending on the level of your class and the time you have allotted, but you could pre select idioms, assign them to a student, or have students find one for my students are lower level, so I always have to limit it, and I have to pre select but you give them an idiom, have them research it, understand it, be able to teach it. And then you assign them a slide on Google Slides, which they can now fix the layout and and, you know, add whatever they want on on it. And then you can have them present it to the class. Students love to do this, and they love to try to use it in context. So as a follow up activity, you could create a quiz ahead of time if you know what idioms they have, and you can have them do some kind of class competition. You could alternatively turn this into a storytelling segment and ask the students to write their own paragraph if they’re that level or sentences. My students love to write sentences. So I keep just little random strips of paper all throughout the room, because at any given moment, my students will say, Oh, here, let me write a sentence in context, and I want to show it to you. So if you have it available, I found this term, they will use it, and students will randomly say, Here, write a sentence. And that’s, again, not something you can always get with digital devices, but the paper itself invites them to write. And then, of course, you can post them around the room. You could have a snowball fight, throw them, and someone picks one up and reads it out loud, something like this. And then guess who wrote it? So Halloween idioms, challenge.
Brent Warner 28:17
Awesome – So that is 13 scary ideas for things you can bring into the classroom
Ixchell Reyes 28:25
And if you do have some scary results to share, botched results are always fun too, right?
Brent Warner 28:35
Yeah, you can always drop your own extra ideas into into the episode at DIESOL.org/128
Ixchell Reyes 28:50
All right, it is time for our fun finds. And as we’re talking about Halloween, you may have been booed, which means someone gave you a little bag of goodies with a little ghost that says you’ve been booed, please spread what chilly awareness, or chili Joy, I don’t know, whatever, to two colleagues. Find a little bag and stuff it with goodies, and don’t let them know it’s you, so that you can keep the mystery going. So if you’ve been booed, or if you’re thinking, you still have time to boo a few people, you can find all of the things you need from I think it’s you’ve been booed.com or just search you’ve been booed. But essentially, sometimes it’s, I’m not a creative person when it comes to filling up a bag of goodies. So I did find for my my mystery people. I i found little ghost squishy, like squishy stress relief toys from Target. And I thought, oh, that’s kind of fun. And also you can use it if you want to keep it in the classroom. You could keep it in the classroom, but they’re just, I think, like $3 squishy ghosts from Target. And once you click on that, you can get other ideas for what to put in your food cue. Bag, your goat bag, nice.
Brent Warner 30:04
All right, so mine is, I kind of don’t like sharing this one, but I’ll, in a sense, because it’s kind of a fast fashion thing, but you can get these cheap skeleton cardigans, right? It’s like a affordable, affordable skeleton cardigan. It’s like 30 bucks or something, 25 bucks. That affordable? Well, it’s, it’s, whatever it’s, but it’s, it’s not like the 150 or $200 like fancy ones, right? So you can get these, these cardigans, and I have a link to one, right? But I just like it as an easy backup costume, because a lot of times we get busy and forget, and it’s like, oh, there’s something to do. And it’s like, okay, and some places don’t allow costumes, yeah, a lot of places, like no masks or all sorts of things. But it’s just like, hey, you can throw this on and you can keep it for a bunch of years, right, and just kind of tuck it away, and then when Halloween season comes out, you pull it out if you need it for a certain day or for a quick event when you’re not really totally prepared to do a full on costume, just a fun little skeleton cardigan, you know, easy to wear and easy to throw on on top of some black clothes or whatever else you got going. So that’s my fun.
Ixchell Reyes 31:03
Find alright for the show notes and other episodes, check out DIESOL.org/ 128 you can find us on most platforms, YouTube, Facebook or Instagram, at @DIESOLpod.
Brent Warner 31:18
You can find me on most of the platforms, at @BrentGWarner,
Ixchell Reyes 31:22
and you can find me at IXY Underscore, PIXY Underscore.That’s @ixy_pixy_
Brent Warner 31:30
All right, What’s scary way to say goodbye. You should die for listening to the DIESOL PODCAST!!!
Ixchell Reyes 31:41
No! “it’s a dead end after this one”.
Brent Warner 31:44
Oh, there we go.
Ixchell Reyes 31:44
Or Dead silence.
Brent Warner 31:46
Dead silence.
Halloween classroom activities don’t have to be boring. We’ve got 13 ideas that are actually going to make your students want to learn – from storytelling twists that’ll get everyone engaged to activities that go way beyond just putting on a costume.
In this episode, we’re breaking down creative approaches that work across different language levels. Have some fun using these strategies to make your classroom come back from the dead. Whether you’re teaching beginners or advanced students, we’ve got something that’ll spark their imagination and make learning feel like an adventure. Want to know how? Tune in!
Activities
- Scary Alphabet Soup Icebreaker- Word building game
- Seance Storytelling
- Halloween Onomatopoeia and Sound Words
- Costume Party Impromptu Play
- I AM (scary) poems (Jessica Pack – Moviemaking in the Classroom)
- History Channel Halloween Videos
- Academic Listening: The Science of Fear (Hidden Brain Podcast Episode + Worksheet
- Translate and Tell a Scary Story from Your Culture. Worksheet.
- Scary Word Ladders
- Fr-AI-nkensteins Monster
- Scary Poems: Diamante Poems
- 100 Word Horrors – an Anthology of Horror Drabbles
- Halloween Idioms Challenge (Slides)
Fun Finds
- Ixchell – You’ve Been Booed stuffer: Squishy Ghosts from Target
- Brent – Skeleton Cardigan – Always an easy back-up costume