Halloween & Day of the Dead Lesson – With Materials

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Day of the Dead, Dia de los Muertos, ESL Lesson Plan, Halloween, Halloween Lesson Plan, Obon, Samhain

Didn’t think I’d be adding new stuff to Lucky Hill, but…’tis the season.

Well, this isn’t exactly new. I figured I’d share one of my best lessons, and one that I believe I didn’t use to its full potential, namely my lesson on Halloween and Dia de los Muertos (Mexican Day of the Dead). I’ve mentioned this lesson before in my long post about the gaijin-san costume, where I brought up how differences are pointed out in Japan to the point of never letting people and students consider the similarities between things and people. That’s where this lesson comes in; it offers students the chance to learn about Halloween, Dia de los Muertos, and compare & contrast the two with a familiar Japanese holiday, Obon, in a Venn diagram.

This is the part of the lesson that I feel I didn’t do so well on, because I went in assuming students knew what a Venn diagram was. I think I asked the JTEs if they did, and was told that they knew it, but only in a math context. Overall, I underestimated how much this concept of using Venn diagrams in language arts would throw the students off. While some homerooms got it immediately, others struggled to grasp this concept, and we ended up running out of time in most classes.

If I were to do it again, with students of the same level, I would divide the lesson into two. I’d start off with the Venn diagram, and compare simpler things, such as “dogs and cats,” “Pokémon and Yugi-oh,” “Arashi and Exile,” and so forth. Then I’d do the introduction to Halloween and Dia de los Muertos in the second lesson.

Below you will find all my old materials for this lesson. First, the actual lesson plan. The worksheets I made are first in this PDF, the lesson plan is the last page here:

Festivals of the Dead Lesson

I used a presentation after the students had done the dictation/info gap exercises. I originally made this presentation in Keynote, but WordPress isn’t letting me upload that file (despite saying that “key” is an acceptable file format…) so I’m including a PowerPoint export of the file here. It may not display as nicely, but you’ll get the point.

Dia de los Muertos and Halloween

You may notice that the slide about spirits doesn’t have a picture. I could be wrong, as it’s been a long time, but I think I left it like that to explain the difference between “spirit” and “ghost,” namely that we usually think of a ghost as something that can be seen and felt, whereas a spirit is usually only felt. (On top of the fact that ghost usually refers to the spirit of a dead animal or person, whereas spirit can be like…the soul of a tree. That’s how I understand these words anyway. Ahaha…)

The last piece of this lesson is the Venn diagram. I simply gave students a sheet of B4 paper, and they had to draw the circles themselves. I’d drawn an example on the board. I suppose you could pre-print the diagram to save some time. There were a few students who had to bust out protractors and compasses to draw Absolutely Perfect Circles but…not too many.

Of course, even with all these materials, I think it’s crucial to do lots of research on your own into these things. One thing I’ve noticed, especially since coming back to the States, is how much people take their own culture for granted, and then end up misrepresenting their culture because of that ignorance. Actually, perhaps what prompted me to post this lesson now was a friend sharing an article on Facebook, namely this one telling people they shouldn’t dress as La Calavera Catrina for Halloween. The author, a Mexican American, makes the surprising statement that Dia de los Muertos is “a traditional event not at all related to Halloween” (emphasis mine), despite the fact that she’d mentioned Dia de los Muertos’ relationship with All Saints’ Day. I was like, “Uh, where do you think the word ‘Halloween’ comes from?”

People can get so caught up in their need to defend their culture that they fail to realize that having things in common with other cultures doesn’t take away from their culture in the least. Sometimes, it seems like people straight out get into a game of one-up. “Neener neener, my culture’s older therefore better and valider than yoooours!” That’s an attitude that I think was present in that article, and it’s an attitude I’d often hear in Japan as well. That’s why I liked doing this type of lesson that brought together traditions from across time and place. There’s nothing wrong with a culture not being 100% unique, especially not when it comes to something as universal as death.

Well, I hope my lesson plan will prove useful in some way or another for someone out there! Until next time, folks.

☆

Random おまけ！

There’s a town in Star Ocean: First Departure which has, perhaps, perpetual autumn. It also has one of my favorite Star Ocean tracks ever, namely “Sweet Time.” Actually, I think I’ve mentioned this track somewhere on this blog before, but…it’s good enough to repeat. Enjoy!

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Halloween Lesson: Thriller

Tags

Halloween Lesson Plan, Thriller

Wow, four posts in one day!  Maybe I will get this blog up to date! *GASP*

It’s probably just because I feel the need to take a break from Square-Enix Members. SEM is to my time as black holes are to matter. ^o^

Anyway, the week leading up to Halloween, we (myself and the other ALT) did a lesson using the video to “Thriller.”  I made a handout of the dialogue and the lyrics, but took out some of the words (that is, made them blank lines).  I also put the translations to difficult words in a text box to the side, since I also wanted to impress upon them that studying song lyrics is a great way to learn foreign languages.  I introduced the lesson by saying that watching scary movies around Halloween is popular in the States.  We played the video twice: the first time so they could just enjoy it, the second time so they could try to catch the missing words, stopping after each blank to get the answer.  I had left out a mix of easy and difficult words, the easiest being “the” (yet there was still one class that managed not to get that one, sigh) and the hardest being “neighborhood.” The first class we did the lesson in, we only gave the students points for answering, but the second time we gave them points and candy.  The promise of candy magically boosted their English comprehension ability to 100%! Well, my co-ALT told me that on the day I went to the Blind School (see previous post), not even candy could make those two classes participate. Classes 3 and 5 of first year…*exasperated sigh*.

Anyway…it was funny to see teachers’ and students’ reactions to the video.  Most classes thought the video was funny rather than scary, though there were some classes (okay, just the girls…-_-;) that were visibly frightened. One teacher really likes Michael Jackson, so she energetically explained to the students how the “Thriller” video was so important in music history.  Another teacher said he thought that it was a good idea, and that he wonders how Americans can understand American songs.  I told him, “no, sometimes Americans can’t understand the lyrics either, that’s why there are so many lyrics websites.” ^o^

Overall, I think it was a very good lesson.  The students got to see a fun, practical use of English.  It was the first time I’d seen them get excited by being flustered.  Pretty much all the classes laughed at the lyric “unless you change that _____ on the dial” and said “too fast! too fast! One more time!”  Usually, when they don’t understand something, most of these students just shut down and decide not to do anything for the rest of class. *facepalm*

That’s all I have to say about the “Thriller” lesson, but writing the above paragraph made me think of something.  For the longest, Americans had (and many still do) the belief that Asians were smarter than just about everyone else.  As social scientists studied to debunk the racist myth, the conclusion they came to was “Asians are high achievers not because they’re naturally smarter, but because they try harder.”  But now, I have to wonder, who were the study subjects?  Did they only study students in top schools?  Because the greater majority of my students (this is not a high academic level school I’m at) give the lie to “Asians try harder.”  As I wrote above, most of them will completely shut down when they get to something they don’t understand.  They’ll come to a word they don’t know in one question, and rather than skipping it and going on to the next question, they’ll just stop.  Even when we say, “if you don’t have a dictionary, please use the classroom dictionaries,” many will sit there doing nothing until they are personally told to go get a dictionary.  Even worse: a few weeks ago a student got completely chewed out.  All this time, he hadn’t been doing his schoolwork.  His excuse was: “I never got the textbook.”  We’re at the end of the second term! Seriously?!?!

Sure, most of this is unabashed laziness, and the no-textbook kid is probably an extreme example of lunkheadedness.  But what is trying harder if not the opposite of laziness?

The only other thing I wonder in regard to this is, how many of Japan’s schools are more like my school rather than top schools?  If there’s actually only a few schools that are like mine, (which I would say is like the average Michigan school), then certainly using my students to argue against “Asians try harder” is not valid.  But if it represents, in truth, the average, then I really have to wonder where the “Asians try harder” thing came from.  Could it be that the Asians we see try harder, while the ones that stay calmly out of the international eye are just your average human being?