Last year was the first time I introduced my Star Wars lightsaber and Darth Vader mask into lessons by way of a tedious link to Halloween and all things evil. For Halloween this year I dusted off my self-made flashcards, which I have used for a few years now, and couldn’t bare the thought of just repeating the same crap as last year.

Consequently I decided to make a new batch of alternative Halloween flashcards featuring characters like a goblin, a vampire, Frankenstein, Batman, Godzilla and inevitably I couldn’t resist introducing a few Star Wars characters in the form of Jabba, Yoda, Darth Vader and Leia although I only referred to her as a princess.

On top of that were such culinary delights as batcake, frog juice, tiger ice-cream and I even treated a few classes to my own Vampire’s Blood drink which was a throwback to the days of the SodaStream (anyone remember that?) and drinks like Witches Brew and Vampires Blood itself. That was a blue drink but this was a red one and was either Pepsi Azuki or some cheap grape soda. Most of the kids were not fooled!

  

In terms of games I did the following:

* pin the tail on the witches cat which should need no explaining.

* fruit salad which is where the students stand on mats and the teacher (or student posing as teacher) calls out a halloween related lexical item. The student holding that card stays put while the others have to change mats which could also be taken up by the teacher of that time.

* hot-pumpkin which is a cheap inferior version of pass the parcel with my pumpkin hat used as a substitute for the parcel and students losing a life when the music stopped with them in possession of the 100 yen hat which I bought a year ago.

Furthermore, I was finally able to incorporate the Simpsons Halloween top trump cards into one of the lessons which I have been waiting to do patiently since buying them at the start of the year. This was done with my kikokusei class on a Saturday which is a group of kids who have lived abroad and are thus a cut above your typical Japanese English-learning student.