MS Bahasa Indonesia

The sixth and seventh grade Beginner Bahasa Indonesia students are learning how to present information to their peers and teachers on a variety of topics.  Our sixth and seventh grade Beginner Bahasa Indonesia class has been learning about family. They have been introduced to vocabulary such as members of the immediate family, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and cousins.  

To become more familiar with the unit vocabulary, students play different games so that they can start to develop an understanding of the relationships they will be learning about.  They begin to develop their language skills by using this vocabulary to build simple sentence. Students then begin to describe the physical attributes associated with different members of their family.  They create posters that show their family unit, and write a paragraph introducing themselves and their family members.

The seventh grade Intermediate Bahasa Indonesia students are learning about occupations.  They have developed interview questions and have to conduct an interview in Bahasa Indonesia about that job.  The focus of the interview is on how they are able to ask questions and understand the responses. Students had to interview people in Bahasa Indonesia and record their responses in Bahasa Indonesia.

Students were able to choose who they wanted to interview. Some of the 7th graders interviewed SIS staff members such as Ms Maya, Nurse Nita and Ms Suci. Teachers such as Pak Parno, Pak Purnomo, and Pak Priyadi were also favorite interviewees. Students also had the option to interview drivers, maids, and nannies. In our upcoming unit, our 7th grade Intermediate class will learn about transportation. Our grade 6 and 7 beginner classes will learn about daily activities.

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HS Theatre

Theatre Arts 10-12

The senior students have embraced Theatre Arts positively in the first academic quarter and have been enthusiastically learning about the theatre form, Documentary Drama. This is a piece of theatre, which can be based on a chosen social issue, or can feature dramatized re-enactments of a historical event. The purpose of Documentary Drama is to both educate and to entertain a given audience.

The performance should aim to contain multiple stories and ideas on the given social topic or event and should be viewed from different perspectives. Senior Theatre students chose the social topic of Beauty/Appearance and then researched various sub-elements of this topic, which would then form the stimulus for a group devised theatre performance of about 15-20 minutes in length.

The group worked harmoniously during the preparation and rehearsal period of the piece, often taking on the role of director and actor during this period. In group devised drama, students are required to use many skills in order to create successful pieces of drama performance. Students revealed creativity, patience, co-operation, flexibility and skills of improvisation during the process. The importance of individual, peer and teacher critiquing is an imperative component of the process. Also, students consistently reflected upon ways to improve the performance during the rehearsal times.

The final performance piece “What is Beauty?” proved to be an excellent example of a Documentary Drama, as students successfully achieved the objectives of this form of theatre. The senior theatre class created a smooth flowing performance with strong transitions between scenes, which ranged from monologues to abstract images; from split scenes to the use of poetry and song lyrics. The exciting part of theatre is not only to see the final performance, but to also experience the journey itself. It has been a pleasure working with the students on this challenging style of theatre.

Grade 9 Theatre

Students have been exploring the art of script writing and performance in the first unit. Initially, students explored simplistically written scripts, which demonstrated how dialogue and stage directions can be combined to create effective story telling in drama. The use of a setting paragraph to set up the scene of the drama was also considered as an important element of a script. The appropriate lay-out of this style of writing was examined and put into practice with the students’ own scripts.

Students developed their own scripts, with the objective of incorporating stage directions into the writing in order to enhance the dialogue. Students found that this really assisted in making the scene more visually interesting for the audience with the use of meaningful stage action. The class experimented with using given words as stimulus for each line of dialogue, which helped with the creation of creative and often humorous scripts.

Character and setting prompts also enabled students to develop their writing from given stimulus. Students had the opportunity to explore basic acting techniques and used their own scripts as a basis for performance work. It was great to see the enthusiasm that students brought to the task of the acting of their own scripted writing.