Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Halloween’s approaching, and I thought people might be interested in seeing a “The Best…” list sharing sites to help English Language Learners find out more about the holiday.

Here they are (not in order of preference):

SITES THAT PROVIDE SOME HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR HALLOWEEN:

CBBC Newsround has a series of very accessible short texts describing Halloween that include images. They give a very good overview.

Watch good, short video clips about its history at the History Channel.

The New York TImes has a slideshow on how the holiday is celebrated in different parts of the world.

Watch another Halloween history video called Haunted Holiday at the National Geographic Channel.

The Hershey’s Corporation has a good animated virtual tour of a haunted house that gives the history of Halloween. There’s audio support for the text, though sometimes they’re not “in sync.”

You can get a good understanding of how different countries recognize and celebrate Halloween at Halloweens Around The World.

The National Endowment For The Humanities has a nice site called Not Just Halloween: Festivals Of The Dead From Around The World.  It has lesson plan ideas and great links.

5 Minute English has a short reading following by comprehension questions about Halloween history.

Heads Up English shares a listening activity about the holiday.

BASIC VOCABULARY AND ELEMENTS OF HALLOWEEN:

MES Games has a good audio review, including a game, of Halloween vocabulary.

The British Council challenges you to find all the items in a Haunted House.

Learn about monsters by reading about another Haunted House.

And, if you haven’t had enough of haunted houses, read another one by the British Council.

EL Civics has a nice overview of Halloween traditions.

Enchanted Learning has a simple cloze on Halloween.

ESP Pods has an audio cloze activity about what happens during Halloween.

Many Things, the great source of ESL/EFL online activities, has a series of word games related to Halloween, including a “Word Drop”. In fact, in the drop-down menu on the page, you can choose to use the same Halloween vocabulary list in many different activities.

The Biography Channel has an entertaining Boo-ography site, though their Zombie email feature might be a little over-the-top for the very young.

Here are two more games I’m adding it to The Best Websites For Learning About Halloween.  They aren’t specifically related to Halloween, but they are word games with a spooky theme.

Spelloween is a spooky spelling game from the British Council.  It’s a bit difficult and most appropriate for Intermediate English Language Learners or above.

Mia Cadaver’s Tombstone Timeout is very similar to another BBC game that is a favorite of my students called Gut Instinct, which is ranked very high on my The Best Online Learning Games — 2008.

Both of these games ask questions related to Math, Science and English, and you can choose which subject you want to use.  One of the improvements that Mia Cadaver has over Gut Instinct, though, is that Math and Science are divided into levels of difficulty.  That makes it more accessible to a larger number of students.

But the big selling point for both of these games is that, within seconds, you can create a private “virtual room” where only your students compete against each other.  Everybody just types in the name you’ve given the room, and the questions begin.  After each question is answered the screen shows the overall ranking of everybody in the room.  Students love it!

Lanternfish, formerly Boggles World, has an excellent collection of hand-outs on Halloween designed for English Language Learners.

Happy Halloween! is from PBS and contains links to many accessible online Halloween-related activities on PBS sites.

How To Haunt Your House is a “how-to” manual from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The Sacramento Bee has a slideshow on the Giant Pumpkin & Harvest Festival.

Halloween: People and Costumes and Halloween Celebrations are two slideshows from the Las Vegas Sun.

Watch an audio slideshow of a Halloween Parade in Wisconsin.

HALLOWEEN E-CARDS:

Choose a monster, use its text-to-speech feature to record a message, and send it to a friend with these two similar Halloween E-Card sites. You can post the link on a website or blog, too.

You can carve a virtual Jack-O-Lantern and send it to a friend or post the link on a website.

Send a talking E-Card from an evil clown — if you dare.

Send a Halloween Talking E-Card here.

ONLINE VIDEO GAMES:

Ghost Motel is a series of “Choose Your Own Adventure” online video games where players role-play a ghost.  They’re great language-development activities, though some of the games have limited content that would not be appropriate for the classroom.  Here are links to the installments that seem okay to me:

Ghost Motel
Ghost Motel 4
Ghost Motel 5
Ghost Motel 7

With Halloween fast approaching, what would be more timely than a new online video game where the player has to rid a house of evil spirits… or else? House, in addition to providing a few scary moments, offers tons of English-language learning opportunities.  You can read this article to find-out how I use online video games with English Language Learners.  Here’s the Walkthrough for the game.

Halloween Pumpkin Room is an online video game in the “escape the room” genre.  Here is its  walkthrough.

Gatuno In Halloween is a brand-new online video game from the developer of the great Esklavos series of games.  As in the Esklavos games, you have an option of playing it in English or Spanish. Playing them in English provides numerous opportunities for language-development since many items are given text labels.

Here’s the “Walkthrough” (the instructions to win). As I’ve described previously, English Language Learners playing these types of games with walkthroughs maximizes their use for language-learning. However, even without it, this game would be good for ELL’s.

DIA DE LOS MUERTOS

Here are several good sites that are specifically related to how Halloween is celebrated in Mexico and Latin America — as the Dia de Los Muertos.

These links, of course, are accessible to English Language Learners:

The Smithsonian’s Latin Center Theater of the Dead is very interactive, accessible, and informative.

Mr. Donn’s Day of the Dead page is not only accessible to ELL’s, it also has links to a number of good lesson plans.

The BBC has an online slideshow about how The Day Of The Dead is celebrated throughout the world.

Mex Connect has a lot of colorful images if you scroll down to the section titled “Images and Photos.”

The New York Times has a short slideshow on how the Day of the Dead is celebrated in Mexico.

Here are two more slideshows on The Day Of The Dead.

As always, feedback and suggestions are welcome.

I’m adding three new links from Teaching Tolerance that relate to Halloween stereotypes.

One is an article sharing Tips About Talking To Kids About Choosing Costumes That Don’t Promote Negative Stereotypes.

The second is an online activity about the same topic called Images In Action.

And the third is a lesson plan on What Halloween Costumes Say.

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