The project began in July, and has been several months in the making. Students have auditioned, scripts have been written, songs have been rehearsed, and dances have been choreographed, all to culminate this Friday with the Halloween Extravaganza. The Halloween Extravaganza has been the 'pet project' of Homei Shane School, and was brainstormed with the intent of showing off the many talents of our students. five of our group classes rehearsed English songs and choreographed dances to accompany them, including Under the Sea (performed by my CEI08 class), This is Halloween (performed by the CEI13 class), and three Halloween-themed children's songs that I helped write verses for called Have a Happy Halloween (performed to the tune of Clementine by the CEI01 class), The Halloween Song (performed to the tune of Frere Jacque by the CE02 class of Lukang) and Great Pumpkin is Coming to Town (performed to the tune of Santa Claus is Coming to Town by the CE03 class). Each of the classes did a great job performing, and it is really weird for me to look back on the day I first introduced each of these songs, the day when I would have said "they are never going to learn this in time". I'm so proud of my students. We also hosted several competitions during the showcase: a spelling bee and a trivia game. I would say that the spelling bee was the least successful part of the show. We hosted two levels of spelling contestants, in the first level the students were given a spelling list that eventually proved to be too easy for them, and the contestants knew most of the words making it a time-consuming process to eliminate each contestant (and eventually we had to announce two winners at this level). In the higher level spelling bee, I experienced the opposite problem. While the first few rounds went alright, but I eventually eliminated all but one contestant in the same round making it a very short spelling bee. The trivia was successful mainly due to how much the contestants studied. With questions in genres like sports, history, geography, pop culture, and English, the students were able to answer every question I threw at them with barely any question-to-answer wait time. Outside of these main group events, we also saw several instrumental acts (including a zither and a violin), a puppet show, two reader theater productions, and a song done by me and two of my private students. Lastly, the largest number of participants came in the form of our student hosts. Each act was introduced with a dialogue between me and one of the students, and each of those dialogues was written as a collaboration between a teacher and that student so it reflected something about the host, like their sense of humor, or their interests. I was most excited to see this aspect of the show turn out well, mainly because it showcased a more natural use of English for the parents than songs or trivia do.
The main flaw of the show was how long it ended up being, the predicted 1.5 hour show turned out to be 2.5 hours, and while I am usually to blame for issues of timing, I am certain it was not due to me this time. My Chinese-speaking counter host was nice enough to provide commentary between each of the acts to allow the parents who don't speak English to hear about the act and performers. The awkward turn around for me is that, while I was warned that if I spoke too much English it could potentially bore the parents or make them feel uncomfortable about not understanding me, but in turn I had to spend at least half of the show's time feeling uncomfortable and bored about the Chinese I wasn't understanding.
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