Happy Halloween!

I was a little nervous about the craziness of the students today, but things actually went better than usual! Granted, I showed a movie in four out of six of my classes. Don't worry though, the movie had academic reasoning.

A couple of weeks ago I saw the movie The Halloween Tree with some friends. I thought that it would be perfect for my students! So Sunday night I made a worksheet to go with the movie. The movie is only 70 minutes long, but there were about 50 questions. Bwahahaha My students went into a panic when they saw it.

The movie teaches about some Halloween traditions and it has a good plot line. I only showed it in my study skills classes and I taught them how to take notes/fill out a worksheet while watching a movie. I never realized what an important skill this is! A lot of my students freak out when they miss a question, so they miss several questions after. They also don't know to read ahead so as to be ready for the next question. You would think that these things would be common sense, but it isn't! It really was a brilliant activity if I do say so. I think I'll do a few more movie activities through out the year.

We started the movie yesterday, and we finished it in three out of the four classes that watched the movie.

I felt kind of bad, because yesterday several students in my 6th period writing class came in expecting to watch a movie because the teacher next door told them we were watching a movie. I don't know exactly how he explained that we were watching a movie, but when I informed my writing class that we would not be watching a movie, they felt quite cheated. Poor kids. Too bad they didn't ask ME what we were doing.



I loved seeing the kids dress up. There were some very creative costumes! I dressed up as an owl, and because of my mask, I had to wear contacts. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, but you better believe that as soon as school was over, I took those suckers out. (I used "suckers" on purpose - they really do suck the juice from my eyeballs! Don't be wigged out by that statement.)
The teacher across the hall (Erin Radandt) blasted Halloween music from Pandora in between classes. It was so funny. She dressed up as a spider. Here were are:

It was a good Halloween. I've been leaving work super late the past couple of days because I have two IEPs and three-year re-evaluations due tomorrow ALONG with progress reports for the students that I'm in charge of. Yikes-a-rama this week is insane. I left around 5:30 pm today, which wasn't too bad. I'm so tired I've been sitting on the couch since I got home!

That being said, I'm going back to my couch-potato-ness. Happy Halloween!

-Ms. Damron-