Halloween Festivities

This last week has been very busy, being the week of Halloween.  Halloween is a big deal in the community.  I haven’t done an official survey, but I would venture to guess half my students or more like Halloween more than Christmas. We started the festivities with the annual Halloween Carnival last weekend.  Teachers and community members all had booths with games or food for everyone to enjoy.  The basketball team ran concessions and the jail, where you could send anyone to the slammer for $1.  I did some time there myself and “carved” my name in the wall (they put up a piece of paper for all of the inmates to sign).  The kids could also play hallway bowling, pin the bow tie on Mr. Bones, a cakewalk, basketball, frog toss (don’t worry, the frog wasn’t real - no frogs were harmed at the carnival) and then there was my game.  I am not creative so I searched the internet for fall festival ideas.  I found a ping pong tic tac toe game that I thought would be fun.   We quickly decided getting three in a row was unreasonable so we just considered getting the ball in one of the nine cups a win.  Since there was no three in a row element, when I tried to explain the game, most of the parents said “Like beer pong?”  Leave it to my luck to find a way to inadvertently bring a drinking game to a school function.

We then had trick-or-treating Wednesday evening.  Mr. Crain made an announcement in the morning letting the kids know that trick-or-treating ended at all of the teachers’ houses at 9:30.  Several teachers expressed their appreciation, because the kids really get into their trick-or-treating.  A few of the kids brought the cutsy little pumpkin buckets for their candy, but most used their backpacks or pillow cases.  The nolstagia in me loved the pillow cases but I know it was more about practicality.  The cute little buckets aren’t nearly large enough to hold all of the candy they would get.  I saw a couple backpacks that were almost full by the time they got to us.  Nanwalek does this trick-or-treating business right!  So much so that I was happy to have parent teacher conferences on Thursday and Friday instead of school.  I’m hoping they have depleted much of their candy supplies over the long weekend and the sugar rush is over by tomorrow morning.

DJ Bones rocking it out with the disco lights!