Oh Halloween, what a wonderfully chaotic day in our beautiful fall season! I must say how excited I was to be in the school on October 31st. Although I understand the movement towards celebrating as “orange and black” day since not everyone regards the traditions and celebrations of Halloween, I myself was raised to participate in the act of dressing up and have come to love the idea of becoming something/one for a day! As I have begun my pre-service journey with two science lessons in the past couple weeks, I could not think of a more fitting costume for myself than the one and only Ms. Frizzle from the television series The Magic School Bus. Being an avid viewer of the show myself growing up I was very enthralled to create one of her famous themed dresses and acquire a green lizard friend of my own!
The second the grade twos walked into the classroom Wednesday morning, they only took a moment or two to figure out who I was – yay!! My wonderful co-op teacher has introduced the class to Ms. Frizzle and her class in previous science lessons so the correlation was well-processed by the students! I was equally as excited to see the awesome costumes many of the students were wearing as well. I appreciated witnessing the way the holiday is acknowledged throughout the school. One student in my class did not participate in dressing up or in the afternoon dance because of diverse spiritual beliefs, and some students participated by wearing orange and black. I noticed a few staff members also regarded the day as orange and black day, which is what some schools have already decided to promote school wide. The class next door to mine were experiencing pumpkin carving during a math lesson which I thought was an interesting way to continue to incorporate curricular understandings with a fun Halloween activity.
Since the school had a dance planned for the afternoon and my co-op teacher had two preps for the lat two periods of the day, we were not left with many options to teach individual lessons this week. My co-op teacher suggested we set up stations with subjected activities for the students to circulate throughout for the entire morning. I was tasked with an art station to which my teacher supplied templates to create Halloween masks. My teaching partner facilitated a “Halloween safety” station and my co-op teacher explained a math game and a word search for the other two stations. My target goals for this week were about giving instructions and how my students responded to the tasks explained to them. I believe the stations were a great way to instigate instructions as we experienced small group facilitation and had to teach the same thing four different times. I think my students did an incredible job in following directions especially considering the excitement of the day! Their masks turned out very cute in the short amount of time the students were allotted to create them!
The morning went by very fast as we interacted with the stations, but the afternoon of a school day on Halloween most certainly does NOT fly by! We helped to supervise the school dance, which was very loud, warm, and a tad overwhelming since this was my first time being on the adult side of a school dance! Even so, it was plenty of fun! I particularly enjoyed how the whole school got to participate in the dance, which is something I have never seen or heard of before. We ended the day with the bat-inspired episode of The Magic School Bus – how ironic! and were able to send off the students in a whirlwind of excitement as many prepared to trick or treat later that evening.
I am grateful for such an exciting and non-typical day in the grade two classroom as we will not be seeing our class for two weeks because of the fall break!
Until then,
Ms. Frizzle
