Today I was struggling to come up with an activity I could do with all my different classes. The problem I had was that on Monday I played a review game with my students, and since I see three of my classes again today, I needed something new. Then I remembered that it was now October, and I should start up my yearly "Monster of the Week" learning units. Lesson plans around October are so much easier with fall back material as fun as monsters and holiday traditions. That’s why Halloween is my absolute favorite holiday.
I varied the activities by level, but in two of my classes I had students write sentences that followed the pattern " A (Monster name) is a monster that …" The students needed to tell me two things about each monster. I went down the list naming and then helping them put their ideas into complete sentences, allowing for cultural differences. After introducing all the different monsters, they had to think of one more monster on their own and write down something following the sentence pattern.
The students started listing other monsters. Things like Greek monsters, or traditional comic book characters occasionally got mentioned too. This is another activity that heavily favors boys that play video games. Some of my female students were scared when I mentioned zombies eating brains. I assured them it was just for fun. One of the students yelled out the name of one of the other teachers when they were talking about monsters. That got a laugh from the rest of the class.
The next thing they had to do was use prepositions and their new vocabulary skills to draw various monsters and creatures in a picture of a haunted house. I had to answer some of the questions over and over again. My "freaky monster" vocabulary is disproportionately large at this point after three years of teaching monsters to children, so I handled their questions fairly well. Without fail, one of the students in the class wrote my name on the "graves" in their picture.
After class, I told the teacher that was called a "monster" about what happened. She said, "Why me? Why would they think I’m a monster?"
I said, "You might think that’s bad, but they want me dead, so cheer up"
