A “Thrilling” Halloween

If you're looking for a fun language activity before the holidays, how about transforming your pupils into dancing zombies?

For the tenth year running, Thrill the World will try to break its own world record for the biggest simultaneous dance to Michael Jackson's "Thriller": 22,596 people around the world! The song's video with Jackson doing one of his famous dances surrounded by zombies is a real classic and the organisers say anyone can do the dance.

It won't be practical to participate as a class in the record attempt as it takes place on 29 October, in the middle of the school holidays. There aren't any events planned in France yet — you could always organise your own!

But in the meantime, it would be a fun Halloween class activity to learn all or part of the dance – anything from a few minutes end-of-class "Let's practise modals" to a full-blown performance in costume. The event site gives a written dance "script" and videos of the dance painstakingly broken down into sections. They aren't very sophisticated but efficient. It could be a group activity with leaders given the job as homework to learn a section to teach to a group, or different groups learning sections and teaching them to each other.

Classroom Exercise
A bit of grammar, a bit of culture and a bit of exercise – a good recipe for a lesson, which fits in perfectly with an interesting experiment in a Scottish primary school where, for a year, pupils have been running a mile a day. At a moment during the day between topics, the teacher simply says "daily mile", and off the pupils run. The teachers say that not only the children's fitness but their concentration and behaviour are greatly improved. It's been so successful other schools are following suit, and Stirling University has launched a study of its effectiveness.