Osnovna škola Ivana Gorana Kovačića Vrbovsko

Looking at the title, you can easily guess what I'm going to write about. And you're right! It's that special time of the year again! It's Halloween! And this is a boo from all of us to all of you!

That we love Halloween is very true. Therefore, we take it very seriously and we dedicate ourselves to decorating our English classroom in a genuine Halloween style. When you enter our haunted classroom, there you'll see an eerie Jack o' Lantern as well as flying bats, spiders, floating ghosts, scary skulls, wicked witches, funny-looking mummies, bony skeletons and so much more.

This year we decided to mark Halloween a bit differently than years before. So there were two Halloween quizzes for the upper classes. The first quiz was for Class 5 who competed against Class 6 while the other confronted Classes 7 and 8. The questions were all connected to Samhain. They had the buzzers of different sound which they had to press after the teacher finished reading a question. Who pressed it before, lost the turn. The teams were very competitive and they proved to be true Halloween experts. Each quiz consisted of 15 questions and the final result in both quizzes was almost tied. It was 8 points for the gold medal winners and 7 to the silver medal winners. Very close, indeed! There were two judges who monitored the buzzers, the team, the answers and the points...and they took their job very seriously. The judge in charge of the calculating was our principal Anton Burić, who is also a Maths teacher (You see why we chose him? And if anything went wrong, of course, we would blame it on him.) and the one in charge of the buzzers and the correctness of the given answers was our special guest from the University of Cambridge dr Sarah Clarke-Habibi, who enjoyed the whole event very much.

But that's not all! We had another dear guest from the Centre for Peace, Nonviolence and Human rights from Osijek, Mrs Nikolina Svalina. She was also quite amazed after seeing and taking part in our Halloween activities. All the participants were given Halloween certificates and the medals as well. The medals were specially designed for that occasion and done by Trofeo from Rijeka. So, thank you, Trofeo!

Did you notice that I had mentioned activities? Not an activity but activities?  Oh, there were activities, o right!  Did you mean the quizzes were all we had prepared for that day? Oh, no! After the quizzes, we had a blast thanks to a traditional game played at Halloween. Bobbing for apples is its name. The four teams, each presenting one of the upper classes, had a go in bobbing for apples. There were three members in each team who had to catch three magnificent apples. Team 7 was the most successful one who managed to catch the apples quite fast. They got wet, they laughed, the younger pupils joined us and cheered...they had fun! The wet and happy participants also got certificates and the winning team got a goody bag with lots of sweets. It was almost like going trick-or-treating!

The last but not the least came our younger pupils who showed us their beautiful Halloween costumes ranging from Screams, monsters, Frankensteins to witches, samurai, wicked cats, and so on. They walked down one of the corridors so that all the other pupils, teachers and our guests could see them and take photos. They were given the certificates for the best Halloween costume because they were amazing! They were scary and funny at the same time! They were cute and original! They spread the true Halloween spirit!

So, as you can see, we are genuine Halloween lovers who enjoy that day and everything that goes with it very much! If you are a Halloween lover, too – next year put on a costume, get in the right spirit and join us! We'll boo the entire school!

Happy Halloween to all!

And to all – a big boo from our little school!