Halloween Monsters

Objective & content

Three comic Halloween figures on one page: an elderly witch, a middle-aged vampire and a friendly three-eyed monster, each drawn with a joke pupils can see (a green nose, trousers that are far too short, a single sock). Fifteen numbered pins, five per figure, point at the body parts and clothes the jokes are built on: hat, hair, nose, scarf, boots; ears, sunglasses, tie, trousers, shoes; eyes, tooth, T-shirt, belt, sock. Pupils write the word for each number, then read three short colour descriptions and colour the figures to match. The teacher key is the second page of the same PDF.

Pedagogical guide

A Halloween sheet usually teaches the Halloween words and stops there. This one puts them to work: the witch, the vampire and the monster are the characters, and the lesson is the everyday vocabulary a pupil needs all year, body parts, clothes and colours, met through something funny enough to look at twice. Every pinned word is A1 or A2 (scarf, sunglasses, tie, belt and sock are A2). The three Halloween names are on-level here even where the glossary files them higher, because they name the subject of the sheet and pupils only read them (R-CULTURE-LEX).

The colour step is reading practice in disguise. "The witch: her nose is green" asks pupils to find the witch, find her nose and pick the right pencil, and it recycles his, her and its in the one context where the difference is obvious: a man, a woman and a monster.

The drawings are deliberately not cute. The figures are caricatures for an 11 to 14 year old sense of humour, not picture-book characters, which is what makes the sheet usable in 6e and 5e without a pupil feeling talked down to.

Suggested procedure

1. (2 min) Show the sheet. Ask which figure is the witch, the vampire, the monster, and what is funny about each one.
2. (8 min) Pupils write the word for each of the fifteen numbers, alone or in pairs.
3. (3 min) Check with the class. Accept glasses as well as sunglasses for number 7.
4. (10 min) Pupils read the colour descriptions and colour the figures to match, then colour everything else any way they like.

Adaptations

• [S] Write the fifteen words on the board in a jumbled order before pupils start, and read the colour descriptions aloud, pointing at the part on your own copy.
• [A] Cover the colour descriptions. Pupils colour first, then write their own description of one figure ("The monster: its T-shirt is orange, its belt is pink.") for a partner to check.
• Speaking follow-up: one pupil describes a figure's colours, the partner guesses which figure it is.

Materials & prerequisites

One copy of page 1 per pupil, coloured pencils, and one copy of page 2 (the key) for the teacher. The low-ink version prints the same sheet with lighter tones. Prerequisites: the colours and the possessive adjectives his, her and its; the body-part and clothes words are what the sheet teaches, so they need not be known beforehand.

Curriculum alignment

France, cycle 3 (6e): axes "L'enfant et son imaginaire" (the Halloween figures) and "L'enfant et son environnement proche" (describing people and what they wear); it also suits a 5e class revising clothes and possessives. Germany, Klasse 5: Körper, Kleidung, Farben. Italy, scuola secondaria di primo grado, classe 1: il corpo, i vestiti, i colori.

Assessment & extensions

The word bank is a quick check: fifteen answers, one mark each. The colouring shows at a glance who read the descriptions and who guessed. Pair it with the Halloween Bingo (A1-) for the seasonal words by ear, or ask pupils to invent and describe a fourth Halloween figure in five sentences.