Lesson Planning

What are you doing for Halloween? I've been preparing one of my first real attempts at a lesson plan, focusing on this wonderful holiday, of course. It'll be for a 6th, a 7th, and four 8th grade classes, so I figured a Word Search would be an appropriate exercise. I dunno, is there a minimum (or a maximum) age requirement for a Word Search? They're not that hard, which may be why I always enjoyed them and probably still do. Thankfully there are websites that also make it not that hard to create a word search these days. I used a site called Discovery School's Puzzlemaker for this one. The words involved are a bunch of typical Halloween costumes, such as "vampire," "pirate," and "doctor." I thought it was odd that I came up with doctor since almost all of the rest are "scary" costumes of some sort, but then I remembered that doctors are also pretty scary. I certainly wouldn't want to BE one in real life.

Germans have a vague idea of Halloween, and people do have some parties, but in general it's nothing like in America. While figuring out what traditions to describe, I wasn't sure how much time I should spend elaborating on the "trick" portion of trick or treating. If I inform them of Halloween tricks, will I be ensuring that they engage in such heinous acts? Is it better if kids not know these tricks exist at all until after marriage, just like with sex? Throwing eggs at houses and having sex are quite similar, after all: they're sloppy, soggy, hateful activities, after which somebody ends quietly sobbing into a pillow, right? Hm, maybe my sex education wasn't so great after all.

I decided to talk about it anyway. I hope the government doesn't pull my funding over this.

By the way, in case it was missed, I'm joking about the crappy abstinence-only "sex education" that the US government believes is the best thing for school kids. "Hope is not a strategy," to paraphrase a paraphrasing I recently saw.