High School Bahasa Indonesia

Grade 9 Advanced Bahasa discussed how Bahasa is used for commercial purposes. Students studied product labels ranging from packaged food, medicines, cleaning products, beauty products, and etc. They learned many new words from these activities such as expiration date, ingredients, storage information, side effects and etc. For the project, students choose a type of product and make a label for it. They have to decide what information needed in the label and write them up in correct and appropriate Bahasa.

Grade 10 Advanced Bahasa’s topic is about Technology. They see that translating English words about technology into Bahasa is very challenging. New words are created all the time, especially in Technology the frequency is high. Words such as solar panel, webpage, gadget and etc are difficult to be translated into Bahasa. Students learned the process of how the equivalences in Bahasa are created and how they are disseminated in the society. 

Grade 11 and 12 Advanced Bahasa class is introduced to Literary Works in Bahasa. They started from the simple ones such as peribahasa, pantun, sajak with the end goal of reading classic literature from Indonesia. For learning poetic expressions of peribahasa, students came up with skits that fit certain peribahasa for example “Air beriak tanda tak dalam” and “Ada udang di balik batu.” Below are photos from the skits students made that fit various peribahasa situations.

Where is Mr. A? How do you get to the Science room from the Lobby? 

In this unit in Bahasa Indonesia for foreigners, our students learned about how to give directions from one class to another at school and how to read a city floor plan.  We began the unit by introducing vocabulary that is used to indicate location, such as di depan, di belakang, di antara, and di seberang. We also discussed the vocabulary used when we want to show directions like, ke kanan, ke kiri, lurus and belum.

The students are expected to be able to use the right vocabulary to show directions when someone asks.  Aside from giving directions, the students are also required to have a final project where they will create their own city and explain where the public places and landmarks are.

Middle School English

As an introduction to “The Writing Process,” the young writers in English 8 class have been steadfastly working toward finalizing our Class Directory essays to meet the publication deadline this week. The entire process began with an imaginary situation and the question: “If you were at a party and met someone you really wanted to get to know better, what kinds of questions would you ask?” The obvious questions of “What’s your name?” and “Where do you come from?” and the like were forbidden.

Instead, students did a TPS (Think-Pair-Share) activity to come up with their own unique questions such as: “What superpower would you want to have?” and “If you could go anywhere, where in the world do you want to travel?” Every pair of students contributed one or more ideas that were used to create a “Cluster Map” of questions that they would all use as starting points to get the process rolling.

Through an array of prewriting activities—brainstorming, webbing, and questioning—students gathered and shared ideas that would be needed later during our formal interviews, whereby students were partnered at random with a classmate and given the task of being both the interviewer and interviewee to glean for more in-depth information from each other.  Soon after, students began drafting their essays, making revisions based on peer feedback, and proofreading for errors in English conventions, both in “editing teams” and independently, to improve their writing in each successive draft. After six or seven drafts, students were ready to create their final drafts for publishing, and I, for one, cannot wait to see the results.

The 8th grade really enjoyed getting to know their classmates better than they had probably imagined, and more than a few surprising revelations were disclosed. What were those, you might ask? Well, you will just have to ask an 8th grader to share their Class Directory booklet with you to find out.