"They did the mash, It caught on in a flash..."

Vampires, mummies, witches....

Tropical monkey princess???

It's not a monster costume, but that was my outfit for my friend Janine's Halloween conversation class. She had a box of dress-up materials we could choose, and I ended with a monkey head covering, a tiara and a lei. Haha.

In addition to dressing up while listening to Halloween songs like "The Monster Mash," we had fun playing several Halloween games in teams...

such as "See which team can put together the paper skeleton the quickest" game...

...and the classic "Wrap two of your teammates up in toilet paper to make mummies" game.

For Halloween lessons at my junior high schools last year, I took the jack-o-lantern that I'd made into the schools and talked about Halloween traditions. But this year, I was't about to show my embarassing Mr. Fish Fin Face jack-o-lantern to my students!

So instead, I was inspired by Janine's class and planned a bunch of Halloween-themed English games. First though, I taught them some Halloween vocab words (ie: ghost, haunted house, skeleton) using some illustrations I printed off the from the internet...

"Class, repeat after me. "Costume. Costume."

Then we played a game in which I called out one of the words, and the students raced each other to see who could get the picture first.

Another game I played with my students at Yamane Jr. High was "Memory," using smaller versions of the Halloween pictures. Every time they turned a card over, they had to say the word in English.

We also played a scavenger hunt game; they had to find suckers that looked like ghosts. (I made the ghosts by putting tissue paper over each sucker with a rubber band, and drawing on a face.) Each "ghost" had an English word on it, and all the suckers put together in the right order made a sentence.

I ended each class by giving them a Halloween word search. Overall, the activities at Yamane on Wednesday went very well! I was going to modify the activities for larger classes and do them yesterday at Misaki Jr. High yesterday, but the school was actually CLOSED due to so many students having the flu!!

There's a big flu outbreak in Kuji, which gives me yet another reason to be excited about leaving for Thailand...tomorrow!! I'll be gone for a week, so it will be a while until my next blog update. I promise to return with lots of photos (and probably videos, too.)

And now I leave you with a few pictures of some scary things in Kuji (besides the influenza virus.) These things are out and about year-round...

On top of a random building:

Inside the Dofukan, behind my apartment:

Outside of the Yamane onsen (public bath):

This guy doesn't look very happy, huh? Creepy is more like it.

I wish for you a healthy, safe and happy Halloween!