Halloween

-

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~School~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

-

CEIP Felipe II LOVES Halloween. Halloween isn’t even a Spanish holiday, but my school has completely embraced it. The week before Halloween and the Monday before it (Halloween fell on a Tuesday this year for those of you who didn’t know), all of the language assistants were taken out of their classes and put to work decorating the school for Halloween. At first I was a little grumpy because I just wanted to be with my sixth graders. Also at the beginning there was not much direction. But by the end of the first day I was really getting into it, as I had to individually decorate each of the sixth grade doors in coordination with the sixth grade theme “skeletons” (4 doors in all, see below).

It was actually pretty fun to be creative and do some arts and crafts – I really wanted to make my doors good for my sixth graders. They loved them. I even had a few kids tell me they looked at the other grade’s doors and thought mine were the best – I think they were a little biased but I’ll take the compliment.

We also decorated and set up the haunted house for the school. I hadn’t done anything like this since 5th grade when the Blenders did their haunted house! The school doesn’t have any restrictions on costumes and encourages “the scarier the better” decorations. So we had creepy masks and bloody looking fonts written on paper hanging around. The school also had really creepy and scary music playing in the background.

On Halloween the whole school participates in Halloween activities. All of the language assistants were in the haunted house. We basically ran it. One teacher, Paloma, stood outside the door and let small groups in at a time, but inside we ran the show. The Principal also participated in a scary hooded cloak and mask. It was so fun trying to scare the kids. My throat hurt so bad by the end of the day! It’s also the first time I’ve ever dressed up as something scary and my outfit wasn’t even that good. I wanted to be an alien and paint my face green and purple since I have this outer space dress, but I didn’t find green and purple face paint so I borrowed some of Elana’s black eye shadow and Willa’s red lipstick and made my eyes dark with red blood running out of them (first photo!). It was definitely unclear what I was, but it was scary for the kids!

In short, the goal of the haunted house was to make the kids cry. Which sounds TERRIBLE but apparently if we made kids cry that meant it was scary…which I guess is the point of a haunted house…but it’s also elementary school! Apparently none of the kids were forced to go inside but I’m sure there is some social pressure to participate. We accomplished that goal though. We had kids cry from every grade except 6th grade…but this was their 6th year so they were used to it. I would say they were the grade that also had the most fun. 4th grade was trying to act like they were really cool and not scared, saying things like “oh hello. What’s your name? How are you?” when you tried to scare them which isn’t really fun. But 6th grade was so into it. They were squealing and screaming and laughing and giggling and just having the most fun time. There’s a reason I adore them so much.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Later~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After school, Willa, Elana and I went to Willa’s cousin’s, cousin’s (Kaelyn is her name) apartment to carve pumpkins. It was hard for us to find them. On the third shop, we got 2! While there, the Uncle of the guy who was scanning our pumpkins tried so hard to set Willa up with his nephew! The poor boy was so embarrassed the Uncle just kept persisting. It was so funny. He kept saying, in Spanish, “why don’t you go out with him? It’s Halloween! Isn’t he such a handsome boy?” We thanked them and went on our merry way. We were going to try and meet up for drinks with some of my co-workers and the head of studies at our school, but the bar they were meeting at was a 45 minute commute away and it closed at 2 so we decided not to go. Instead, we got a drink with Kaelyn and one of her roommates at a place that had just opened after being under construction. It was a really relaxing evening and a great Halloween in Spain. While we didn’t go “crazy”, it ended up being perfect especially since the next day we had to wake up and move to our new apartment! I can’t imagine having to do that after a night out (Spanish night life ends at like 6am…even though I can’t make it that long still) and drag our stuff and move in feeling terrible. We left our carved pumpkins with Kaelyn and her roommates since we didn’t want to have to carry them across town, but we have picture memories of our pumpkin carving accomplishments.