Friday, November 9, 2007

Halloween

It turns out that the biggest jack-o-lantern I've ever made was in Japan. I brought in the pumpkin pictured above for my third-year class to carve, but it wasn't easy. It took two people, myself and another teacher, to lift it, and then we carted it to the classroom.

Everyone seemed to have a good time, though it was a little disorganized since it was so last-minute (I only managed to procure a pumpkin the day before, thanks to the other ALT who visits my school).


The class involved was my 3H class, hence the creative design for the nose and mouth. (The faces are censored because, technically, it's illegal to show recognizable pictures of your students online without parental consent).

I let them do everything themselves, although the partially mutilated top is mostly my fault. I got them started cutting the top off, but I started too high. After going around to some other students, I came back to find that, having been unable to remove the top completely, they had begun chipping away at the poor pumpkin's left lobe. So, we tried again lower, hence the scars around the top.

When they cut out the first piece from the face (the heart-shaped eye), they were almost more interested in the removed piece than the pumpkin itself. They held it up triumphantly and shouted "kawaiiiii!" (all girls). They thought it was so cute to have this little heart-shaped piece of pumpkin. As some of them continued to work on the pumpkin, others worked on the heart piece, boring out it's center to make it into a bowl and filling it with chopped-up pumpkin cubes like some kind of melon. They asked if they could eat it. I told them they weren't supposed to and they immediately went around offering some to other teachers in the halls.


I prepared a couple other activities for them to do while not working on the pumpkin, like this origami witch's cat design I found online.


It was mostly girls that got into the origami. Not surprisingly, the cats all came out rather well. In the end, none of them took their cat with them, and now I'm left with a drawer full of them.

3 comments:

Sean said...

That is one gargantuan gord! Your students must find Halloween to be very strange.

N said...

nice cat

amanda said...

Fun times in Japan.

That's funny how you had to black out your students eyes.

I'm glad you didn't have to black out the big old bums of those sumo wrestlers! We've had many a laughs here looking at those great pics!