Halloween

In the spirit of Halloween I wanted to talk about how introducing the tradition of horror stories (oral or written) can help in the literary classroom.  There are many ways to get students still learning in a creative way for this particular holiday.  I have had teachers who allow us to storyboard and to create short videos as a project.  With the video we have to translate the movie into a story form.  Although the movie part was not my favorite, I loved going screen by screen and translating every detail into a narration.  I always thought it was funny how some of my classmates believed the film to be more suspenseful while others found the reformat of the written story to be the scariest.  It was the class after this project that we focused on how these horror stories were passed down before writing them down was possible.  I loved focusing on how a story could be transformed into oral language, with pauses and moments of silence to drag on the horror of the tale.

I love to read  but hearing a story that is spoken and not read is always the most effective.  I can't even say how many times I have heard the tale of the Jersey Devil, but each time it's a little different and each time just as scary.  I found some websites that focus on some tales that can jump start this activity in the classroom.  Most of them are podcasts to provide the eerie sense that every student craves on Halloween.  I loved doing this activity in High School and look forward to using some form of this in my classroom to stress the importance of storytelling before written language came along.


http://americanfolklore.net/halloween.html.  (This is a great website with scary stories through the form of podcasts)

http://www.education.com/magazine/article/Storytelling-and-Ghost-Stories/ (goes over particular factors that heighten the effect of a story)