Fall Fest Success!

As you saw in my Pumpkins post, it's been a little bit of a welcome challenge to bring Fall to Malaysia. We talk about it at school, we pretend that 75 degree weather and a thunderstorm constitutes wearing a sweatshirt, and we bake pumpkin cookies. To make it even more official, we decided to hold a Fall Fest! Since Halloween marked the last day of the 1st quarter and we have to be off-site on Thursdays, we decided that November 1st would be a perfect day for the event.

And it was! We started decorating the multi-purpose hall of my condo building at 8 am. Families started arriving at 8:45 and we got started with the games at 9:15! First activity was a family photo scavenger hunt. Teams had 30 minutes to find and take a picture of everything on the list. They took off running and had a great time being creative with their finds!

After the hunt, we played a school-wide game of Capture the Pumpkin (a festive-version of Capture the Flag). It was a BLAST! Parents and students were getting into it: dodging, sliding, tagging, falling, guarding, and capturing!

This picture perfectly expresses the intensity of the game!

After 3 rounds of the game, everyone was ready to eat, so we went inside for a huge, scrumptious cookie cake, made by one of the moms. It also happened to be our director's birthday, so we sang to him and gave him some gifts, too!

Then it was time for some good ol' fashioned carnival games! We had apple bobbing, bowling, ping pong toss, knock down the cans, cornhole, face-painting, frog hop, and football toss. We had found American candies for prizes and the kids had fun running around, playing games, and filling up their prize bags!

When the pizza arrived, we rounded everyone up to eat and then said our farewells and started cleaning up. It was only a 3 hour party, but it was exhausting! We had originally scheduled pumpkin carving into the plans, but ran out of time with everything else. So we sent them with families to do
at home. A few of the parents said they'd have to google directions because they'd never carved a pumpkin before and didn't know how!

Great cultural experience for our non-American students! A good memories and stand-in Fall Fest for our American teachers!