High School PE

Our High School PE classes have started positively this new academic year. High School students from Grade 9 and 10 have been fully engaged in the lessons and have proved themselves to be excellent learners. This has been great to see and we look forward to this continuing throughout the semester. 

The High School classes meet once a week for PE and once a week for Swimming.  In all lessons, students engage in warm up activities, stretching, and learn through practical activities; how to work together as a team. During the second quarter, students have been learning about Floor Hockey  and Basketball and have been working on improving their skills and abilities in these sports. Students also have the opportunity to actively participate in team matches. In the Swimming classes, students have been focusing on backstroke, which is one of the many swim strokes they will learn this year.

In addition to the regularly scheduled PE classes, High School students are able to participate in Basketball, Ping Pong, Badminton, and other sports during their daily lunch recess.  The SIS pool is used for the ASA: Beginner Swimming and also for the regular Swim Team. Varsity basketball make use of the gymnasium after school throughout the week. 

 

High School Bahasa Indonesia

The HS Bahasa Indonesia Class for foreigners has just completed the “Masakan Indonesia” unit. In this unit, the students research Indonesian dishes, then cook them and/or taste these dishes. There are dishes that they have tried before, such as Soto Ayam, which is very popular. But there are also those who try to cook traditional snacks such as dadar gulung (Indonesian pancake). We ended this unit with more knowledge about Indonesian cuisine.

The unit we just started is a unit about Indonesian film where students are introduced to the film genre and some popular Indonesian movie trailers. In this unit, students are invited to learn about Indonesian culture tucked in the film. As the final project of this unit, students will be asked to make a full film review in Bahasa Indonesian.

This semester in Grade 11/12 Advanced Bahasa, students are introduced to Literary Works from Indonesia. The novel they have started reading is Laskar Pelangi or the Rainbow Troop. As the first assignment for this novel, students were to draw illustrations after reading the first chapter. They needed to highlight parts of the novel that correspond to their illustrations. 

As for the second assignment, students were to study the lyrics for the song “Laskar Pelangi” that tells the story from the novel. They sang the song in small groups without any access to the lyrics text. This was a challenging task for some of the students because the words in the lyrics are poetic and are not from everyday vocabulary. However, they did a great job at it.

Grade 10 is learning about “Environmental Issues in Indonesia.” They read various texts about water, air, sound and land pollution problems from the remote island of Pulau Bulan in Sumatra until Indonesia’s biggest city–Jakarta. These problems inspire people to write songs, poems, stories and articles to bring up the issues. They study these responses and are challenged to come up with responses of their own.

Grade 9 is learning about Geographical Features in Indonesia. They read various texts about mountains, rivers, islands, lakes, and etc. They find out that some of these areas have become tourist destinations, conservation areas, and national parks. They will be asked to identify other areas that need to be protected. They will present their proposal to classmates with descriptions about their own chosen areas and reasons they need to be protected.

Middle School Theater Arts

Grade 6 Theater Arts

Students in Grade 6 ended their semester in Theater Arts with their involvement in the Fall Theater Production.  The group worked collaboratively on the performance, and in the process, created a funny, fast paced series of vignettes that explored how caped crusaders deal with life in street clothes on their day off. It was an absolute joy to work with the Grade 6 Theatre Arts students. They were enthusiastic and motivated during the rehearsal process, and also on the stage on the day of the production. It was fantastic to see such talented students performing to various members of the SIS community.

Grade 7 Theater Arts

The Grade 7 class began their Theater Arts studies at the commencement of the second semester. After introductory activities based around general drama skills of performance, students will embark on their next unit in the weeks ahead. The group will be learning about the style of theater known as Melodrama and the numerous conventions that make this drama so unique.

Some of these conventions include; the use of the aside, audience participation with cheering and booing at relevant moments in the drama, standard plot lines and the use of the stock character, such as the villain, the hero and the heroine. These conventions will be practically imagined in numerous scripted activities. Grade 7 students will have the opportunity to enjoy being melodramatic in theater class activities this semester!

Grade 8 Theater Arts 

Semester 2 is the time where the Grade 8 group will be able to demonstrate their dramatic skills in the Theater Arts class. Students began their study by considering basic skills needed for effective acting on the stage.

In the following unit, the class will delve into how an actor can communicate a message to a given audience though non-verbal communication and through the art form: Mime. The group will begin the unit with the experimentation of basic mime activities, which will be followed by the exploration of character emotion without words and finally to the creation of story with the use of mime only. Throughout their journey in the topic of mime, students will have the opportunity to create pieces of theater, revealing strong skills of non-verbal communication.

Middle School English

Over the past two weeks in 6th and 7th Grade English Language Arts, the SIS middle school students have been engaged in Book clubs. The clubs are based on specific themes; “cooperation” in 6th Grade and “perseverance” in 7th Grade. The students chose their specific book for their club after watching movie trailers for a selection of books that expressed the theme of cooperation and perseverance.

Students were then given an overview of what to look for in a work of literature where they brainstormed and shared such literary elements as conflict, burning questions, plot events, character traits etc. Then Ms Kim read the students Mo Willems Don’t Let Pigeon Ride the Bus as the students identified the “look-fors.” The students were instructed on how to take notes on the “look-fors” with post-it notes throughout the reading.

A typical book club lesson is as follows: Students engage in a short grammar warmup then read their book for about 20 minutes. After taking time to organize their notes, the students then get into their book discussion groups and share their notes as well as any additional insights. Students are encouraged to ask questions of one another in their discussions as well.

Upon completing their novel, students are tasked with writing a 5 paragraph essay that identifies examples and evidence of the class theme in their respective novel. An advantage of Book Clubs is that students can meet and discuss the same book or they can meet and discuss different books recognizing that the overarching theme is the same and that students are looking for the same elements in their reading. So far, student response to the book clubs has been positive and I look forward continuing this activity further down the road.  

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