A Good Day

I had a great day today. We did Halloween (for half the kids, our first class together), mostly 6-8 year olds, and another class of 9 year olds. For those students who I had on Tuesday, we re-sang Brother John, played the Listen,Be Quiet,Repeat game (I do the gesture, they say the word; I say the word, they do the gesture), and talked about their homework: ask their parents for English words in the French language, like week end and t-shirt. For all classes, we talked about halloween: what they do, what they dress up as, how to say Trick or Treat. I carved a jack o'lantern and showed that to them, explained how to make one, got them to say pumpkin and jack o'lantern. Then, for the young 'uns, I passed out a little pumpkin and told them "color the stem green, color the eyes, nose, and mouth black, color the pumpkin orange." For the older group I passed out a worksheet that had a wordsearch, a maze, an explaination of Halloween in French, and three jack o'lanterns to color. At the same time as the respective coloring activity, I went around with candy in a cauldron (brought back from Mali). They had to knock on the cauldron and say "Trick or Treat" to get the candy. In the older class, they had to pull a piece of paper out of my hat that said either "Trick" with a ghost or "Treat" with a pumpkin. If they got the pumpkin, they got the candy. With the ghost, they had to answer an easy question like "what's your name" or "what color is this" before getting the candy.
The teachers all loved it and some even took notes! My big problem is that I keep running over my time by about 5 minutes, and the kids don't want to go to recess, they'd rather stay in English class!