Story and Poem Writing
Friday October 29th 2021Thematic Learning Made Meaningfully Fun
Learning should be fun, especially for younger students. Students learn better through identifying, exploring, inquiring, and experimenting (new) objects in class. When students are engaged and motivated, they do not see learning as something difficult. Moreover, students perform better when they enjoy the learning process. Therefore, it is the teacher’s job to create an engaging and motivating atmosphere during the learning. During this pandemic, online learning for young students is another challenge. Then, teachers’ challenge gets doubled, but needs to be addressed anyway.
As a Sekolah Perintis Kerja Sama (SPK), which uses Cambridge International Curriculum and Kurikulum 2013, Al Azhar 55 Islamic Primary School teachers are challenged to make our learning, in both curricula fun, enjoyable, and meaningful during the pandemic. Therefore, there would be no stakeholders who would compare and judge that one curriculum is better than the other curriculum; or that classroom learning is better than online learning.
After a while, since the pandemic began, we have made the effort and proved that pandemic did not stop us from making innovations. What follows is the work that grade 2 students have completed in Term 4 in Thematic: poem writing in Bahasa Indonesia and story writing in Civic Education. The teachers have found ways to make the learning ‘classy’.
Bahasa Indonesia
The first basic competence to learn in Term 4 for the second graders is to read and write poems. First, students learned how to read poems. Then, they performed reading poems about nature, family, and friendship, one by one. In week 5, students were assigned to write their own poems about nature based on some examples they had read before. Surprisingly, our students did create their own poems. Most of them said that they got a little help from adults in the house, but some students said that they made it by themselves.
Civic education
The first theme to learn in Thematic in Term 4 is ‘Kebersamaan’. In Civic Education, students learned how to do mutual work at home with their family, the ‘Akhlakul Karimah’ or the good manner of being kind to others, and also togetherness while on a vacation with family. In the topic ‘Togetherness while on a vacation with family’, the students had to make a story about their experience of going on a family vacation and to provide a picture about it. Here are some of their work. Looking at students’ wonderful work, we hope that they find both classroom and online learning as much fun.
