Halloween in Badajoz

This week (actually two weeks ago from this week) I had classes with 14 and 15 year olds. Their level of understanding English is pretty good, so we breezed through the material I had gone through with the 12 year olds. We started talking about Halloween, its origin and traditions, and then I asked them to get into groups of 4 or 5 and come up with a short scary story. In every class, they asked the teacher, "In English?" and he responded, "No, in Mandarin Chinese!" Sometimes the kids said, "I'd prefer the Chinese." Sassattacks.

They came up with some good stories, most of them were not very creepy or scary. The shortest one I remember went something like this:
"A boy walked up a mountain and then he fell. It had lots of ghosts, he was frightened and died."
Some of the stories included zombies, mummies, and cats. One girl asked the teacher how to say "el interndo" in English. I knew that word because of the Spanish television show with the same name. The teacher consulted me and said "college?"I told him I was thinking more along the lines of boarding school and so he said, ah yes, boarding school and then told the student "boarding school." She looked really confused so he started spelling it "b-o-a-r.." and she was still confused so then (this cracks me up) he said "boaRRding school" with a really heavy "r" and she understood. It was interesting to see how she could understand English with a Spanish accent but had so much trouble with my accent.

The next week (last week) I was in Valverde and we celebrated Halloween on Thursday, for the last half of the day. There were four different classes that participated, 5°A y B and 6° A y B. There were four different stations for the kids to move through: face painting, pumpkin or bat broche making, moster's posters and making edible spiders. I worked at the monster's posters station with Monica. There were 5 different monsters on a poster (Dracula, a female vampire, a mummy with a cane and glasses, a werewolf, and a witch) and each poster had a space to fill in the Name, Age, Occupation, Hobbies and Description of the monster. We had a large piece of butcher paper that had examples of things to write for each category and if someone had a question about how to say something we wrote it on the paper. It was a little hectic because there was music playing really loudly. They played the entire Thriller cd. Monica had a class during the last period, so I was on my own with the last class. Another teacher came over to help me, but her English isn't very good, so she went to help out with the face painting station. The last class was tiring because there were so many kids shouting "Seño! Seño!" (short for Señorita) and would then ask something like "Que significa age?" (pronounced ahe). The ages of the monsters ranged from 25 to 2000.