Character Parade

For the past few years, our school has had a "Character Parade" around Halloween and this year it fell on the 31st.  Personally, I don't believe that character or costume parades or parties have a place in public schools, but I wasn't the one making the scheduling decisions.  (I found this post at care2.com which includes a variety of reasons why Halloween activities are not such a great idea in schools.)  But since we had to participate in the parade, the fabulous 2nd grade teachers had the idea for each class to select a book and have the entire class dress up as the characters from the story.  I loved this idea because we could make the costumes in class and ensure that no student would be left out.

I selected Caps for Sale, by Esphyr Slobodkina because we had just read the book and I figured monkey costumes would be really cute. And they were!  The kiddos colored in monkey masks and visor caps (from Scholastic.com).  They were allowed to be out of uniform so they all wore brown or black clothing.  My wonderful and accomodating assistant teacher agreed to dress up as the peddler.  The kiddos had a great time in the parade and we got a lot of compliments from other classes and families.  (I think some families were just pleased that they didn't have to send their child's actual costume to school and risk it get ruined.)

A lot of the arguments I've heard for why schools should do things like have Halloween parties and be able to wear their costumes to school is because they are fun, but I have to say, I think my kids might have had more fun with this than when they wore their own costumes.  In fact, one of them even said to me, "It's so cool that we get to get to be characters here at school and then we get to do Halloween and trick-or-treating after school too!"  Success!