Halloween?

Hi all

I've had a few people come to me about teaching Learn Together and how to tackle Halloween in the classroom so I thought this site might help.

Halloween is just one of several harvest festivals in the calendar and while it is the most commercial and the majority of children in the school celebrate it, we have to consider our obligations in terms of the ethos of the school.

First things first, Halloween isn't banned but you are obliged to ensure that no child is an outsider. (See this site for examples of faiths that do not celebrate Halloween and why.)

Halloween can and should be marked alongside any of the other harvest festivals that exist around this time of the year. Your first port of call might be the Monthly Calendar which lists events that are happening in October/November. Some of the festivals in there are listed directly in our Learn Together At a Glance plan, which you can find here.

For example:

Senior Infants are down to learn about Winter Solstice / Samhain

but there are a couple of other minor festivals on my list and more on the right hand side. There are some great festivals at this time of year that children might not be familiar with and it can be very interesting to see what they have in common with the ones they are familiar with.

Possible activities

Younger Classes:

• Make a harvest display

• Make decorations to celebrate harvest festivals

• Read some picture books about autumn / Halloween time and discuss them. There are plenty of read-long books on YouTube.

• Take a "leaf" from this school's Aistear activities

Older classes:

• Find out autmn/winter harvest festivals in each of the main 6 world religions

• Design a tour on Google Maps. It could be a map of pumpkin festivals, harvest festivals, famous apple orchards, or anything around autumn/winter harvest

• Find out why some people don't celebrate Halloween and why. Design/Create an event that celebrates Autumn which includes everyone.

• Pick any harvest festival and make a document, presentation, site about it.

The main thing is not to focus solely on Halloween. For sure, make sure that children understand what Halloween is and where it came from. Many of them won't know it has its roots in Ireland. This site gives loads of historical information about Halloween: https://www.history.com/topics/halloween/history-of-halloween 

Decorating your Classroom

In terms of decorating your classroom, think about harvest, autumn, etc. Try not to focus solely on Halloween. It's certainly not ok to only have Halloween decorations. Think about decorating your classroom with natural products like fallen leaves, apples and pumpkins instead of plastic decorations. Perhaps get the children to make autumnal decorations.

In fact, why not try something different like celebrating Black History Month and there is a myriad of different things happening throughout October (https://www.daysoftheyear.com/days/oct/) The main goal is that no child is an outsider. 

Dress-up Day

In order to be inclusive, the last day of term is a dress-up day where children (and staff) can dress up in a costume of their choice, if they wish. Many children may wish to dress in Halloween costumes if that is part of their culture. Others might dress up in other costumes. Much like everything above, please make sure to call the day "Dress Up Day" rather than "Halloween" in much the same way we are used to calling our winter concert a winter concert rather than a Christmas concert.

In terms of rules around costumes, although comon sense should prevail, a couple of guidelines:

• Costumes should not culturally appropriate (i.e. dressing as a stereotype of a particular race/culture)

• Costumes should be age-appropriate!

Sometimes, it's interesting to learn from religious people...

The website on the right is from a Christian website, which asks whether followers of Jesus should celebrate Halloween. It's interesting that they also have some ethical dilemmas on the subject!