MS Music

This school year middle school music classes are organized by grade level. Eighth grade is split into 2 sections, 8A and 8B. This semester grade 6 and grade 8A have music class. Grade 7 and grade 8B will have music class in Semester 2, after the December holiday break. All of the middle school classes meet twice a week for 45 minutes.

The students are excited for the introduction to band class. They start exploring what instruments they want to master and select their own repertoires with guidance from the teacher, Pak Priyadi.   The SIS music program allows students to have opportunities to learn the basic techniques of playing instruments as well as singing. Students have a chance to learn more than one instrument in class and they learn the basic mechanics of playing the instruments. Good posture and fingering are emphasized in these courses. Middle School music classes prepare the students for the more challenging classes in high school. As a culminating project, Middle School students will participate in the school concert at the end of the semester.

HS Mandarin

Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival

The Mid-Autumn Festival (zhōng qiū jié 中秋节), also known as the Moon Festival, is a popular harvest festival celebrated by Chinese people. In Malaysia and Singapore, it is also sometimes referred to as the Lantern Festival or Mooncake Festival.

The Mid-Autumn Festival is held on the 15th day of the eighth month in the Chinese calendar, which is usually around mid or late September in the Gregorian calendar(24th September this year). It is a date that parallels the autumn and spring equinoxes (chūn fēn)of the solar calendar, when the moon is supposedly at its fullest and roundest. The traditional food of this festival is the mooncake, of which there are many different varieties.

The Mid-Autumn Festival is one of the two most important holidays in the Chinese calendar, the other being the Chinese New Year, and is a legal holiday in several countries. Farmers celebrate the end of the summer harvest season on this day. Traditionally, on Mid-Autumn Day, Chinese family members and friends will get together to admire the bright mid-autumn harvest moon, and eat moon cakes (yuè bǐng 月饼) and pomeloes (yòu zi 柚子) together.

Accompanying the celebration, there are additional cultural or regional customs, such as eating moon cakes outside under the moon, carrying brightly lit lanterns, lighting lanterns on towers, floating sky lanterns, burning incense (fén xiāng 焚香) in reverence to deities including Chang’e, planting Mid-Autumn trees (shù zhōng qiū 树中秋), collecting dandelion leaves and distributing them evenly among family members and Fire Dragon Dances (wǔ huǒ lóng 舞火龙).

Chinese traditional festival is one of the most important parts of the Chinese culture and is always a part of SIS Chinese language program. We usually celebrate together with our students by participating in a variety of activities.