How to think, Not what to think: Science Project for 6th grade - Moon Revolution

In 2014, Indonesia’s Minister of Education who served us around that time, Anies Baswedan, said that our Educational system is in danger. The data showed 75% Indonesia’s school are bellow the education standards. Indonesia took the 40^th place out of 40 countries that participated in the education quality mapping (read the article by Aswandi here). It’s caused by many factors, such as the facility, teachers quality, curriculum, the policy, and many more. They make such a perfect bond; when one flaw can destroy the rest.

The basic problem in this field is there are still a lot of the teachers teach in the subjects different with their educational background. It happens mostly in elementary school. Which is for me elementary is the basic level to start and maintain the kids mind set (read my writing ‘Science for elementary, do we need to take it seriously?’). in my opinion, i‘m pretty sure that it will be hard for a teacher with social educational background to teach science or math. 

As the result,  most of the students in Indonesia aren’t trained to be critical, not used to solve problems, short thinking, have less idea, and so on. They used to accept the materials that the teachers have given to them as the way it is and without knowing how could it be happened, why should we learn about it, and what’s the benefit of the knowledge.  This occurs because whether the teachers or the students were too attach to the textbook, which is we already know, there’s almost no book that can explain any process in science phenomenon clearly. We know for certain, in science we can not let the students think abstractly, they need to feel it with all of their senses, by seeing it, hearing it, and feel it by doing it. One of the most powerful method that we can use to obtain the best result is Experiential Learning. In one of UNESCO’s modules, Teaching and Learning for Sustainable Future that written by Bernard Cox, Margaret Calder and John Fien said:

“Experiential learning engages students in critical thinking, problem solving and decision making in contexts that are personally relevant to them. This approach to learning also involves making opportunities for debriefing and consolidation of ideas and skills through feedback, reflection, and the application of the ideas and skills to new situations.” (more info click here)

So here, to give at least a simple example of it, i’m about to tell one of mine and my students science project guided by the Experimential Learning to develop the students curiosity over their world, their nature, and their own lives.

Science for 6th grade: Memorizing The Planets Through Singing and Drawing

Since I was young, I’m really bad in memorizing anything. I need to read my textbook at least 10 times. When I was in college, the materials that I learned had improved as well as the time I need to spend to memorize it. 100 is the biggest number of me to repeat the same thing over and over again just to make sure i’ll understand those aliens words, it mostly happened when the exam days came. But the most unbearable thing was, my brain didn’t really care how much effort did I make, or how long it took, this arrogance brain will forget everything right in time, after I read the first word of the exam sheet. It irritated me a lot!

Now, as a teacher, I really won’t let my students have the same experience as me. I need to find a simple, fun, yet effective way in memorizing. I used the planets topic as my experiment. Days before, I was asking some of junior and high school department students whether they remember the planets in the solar system that they have studied when they were in the 6^th grade. Just one student out of 10 remembered the planets order, few of them knew the name with no order. And most of them even forgot some of the planets. To solve this I tried to find the way so that my current students in 6^th grade won’t forget this topic as the upper classes did. One method that I can find in internet was memorizing through singing. Stefan Koelsch in Brain and Music Journal (2012) said:

“Listening to music, and music making, engages a large array of psychological

processes, including perception and multimodal integration, attention, learning

and memory, syntactic processing and processing of meaning information, action,

emotion, and social cognition”

To obtain good result, I combined the singing with the drawing and coloring activity, we call it memorizing through visual; when the eye can learn. We can just picturing the shape and the oder one by one in the brain whenever we recall the memory. luckily the students created such fun choreography as well, so that not only brain and visual, but also storing the memory in the body (The body memory). We can see the result in this video bellow….

Right after that day, i often see them making fun of the choreography while singing the songs. I assume that this song really got into them. They smoothly remember the planets order just like they remember the alphabet.

Teaching Method : Bingo Game For Evaluation

Mr. Wiki said “Bingo is a game of chance played with different randomly drawn numbers which players match against numbers that have been pre-printed on 5x5 cards......”

Hmm Mr. Wiki, the fact that i'm not and i will never be a gambler, i really don't have any idea about that kind of bingo. We’re just gonna play a different type of bingo, which more “student friendly”, that is “Lines Bingo”.  In Lines Bingo there are many kinds of grids people usually play, like 3x3, 4x4 or 5x5 grids. But for the starter, i'd like to choose the 3x3 grids.

What we must make is a horizontal, vertical or diagonal line to get a “bingo”. 

 

When somebody already get the pattern, as the winner, that ‘body’ can shout “Bingo!”. End of the game.

Now, how to adapt this game to the lesson? Before we start the game, it’s better for the teacher to make 9 questions about the latest topic that the students have just learned. After that...

The Untold Story : Clear Instruction for little Prankster

There are various personalities on the students, depends on the background and the environment, and every personality always bring a story. It might be the sad, happy, or funny story, and sometimes they need the right time, the right person, and the right chance to show us their true self. But above it all, whoever they are, whatever they do, they never failed to make me in love with them. 

In 6th grade, there are four little active and clever boys. Sometimes they are quite hard to handle, yet it’s kind of hard for me as well to get angry at them. Hardly believe their cute actions always mesmerize me in good ways. 

And this story bellow can be an example why i never can get enough of teaching them :D.

Science for elementary, do we need to take it seriously?

Science for elementary is the most fun yet complicated lesson ever. When i was still in university, my lecturer ever told me that elementary is the basic stage to form the kids mind.  I will explain it as if it's a formed object. when the teacher creates round objects inside the kids mind, these kids' brains will keep it as round objects forever for their entire life. Later on, along to their growth, they will solve every problem in round way.

 

When the kids used to think in scientific way, means that everything have a reason to be happened,  they won't just take everything easily, they will have many questions to be answered. In the end, they start to solve it no mater how just to satisfy their hunger of knowledge. This is how the scientist and the leader have been created. They have big curiosity over something that catch their interest, and struggling in finding a way to solve that thing.

But now, what if the teachers think that the elementary is the easiest stage of school life? in Indonesia, many teachers that i know used to think to not take the elementary students seriously. For them, no need to explain the materials in detail. The kids have been trained to accept everything as it is, no more questions, no more explanations. Get it or leave it. With this method, i'm pretty sure, in the future, their students will grow up as employees. People might think: why? nothing's wrong with being an employee right? they are not jobless though. Yes, nothing wrong with it, but if we can create the trend setter why should we create the follower? if we can create the producer, why should we create the consumer? End of the arguing.

Props for Science Activity : Homemade Clay (with little weird story)

Im going to tell a really ‘touching’ yet ‘awesome’ story, between me and my lovely Mr. Wiki...

Once upon a time, i was struggling surfing on the internet beach when suddenly i met this guy, a really great helper that i used to meet before, Mr. Wiki. when i asked him whether i can find the meaning of Clay is, Mr. Wiki said "Clay is a fine-grained natural rock or soil material that combines one or more clay minerals with traces of metal oxides and organic matter", but hell no Mr. Wiki, we are not gonna talk about that kind of clay. i was begging him to look up for another file, then Mr. wiki went to his mind palace to find what i really want. he came with a really big box full of paper, he rummaged for awhile till he found a little square paper inside, he smirked and pointed at me "are you looking for the meaning of Polymer Clay?" oooh yes, absolutely i am! "Polymer clay is a type of hardenable modeling clay based on the polymer polyvinyl chloride (PVC)" he continued, then i asked him how much do i have to spend for it. "it's about 50K for its little bar, but it depends on the brand and the colour" i was about to faint, but Mr. Wiki held me tight. with teary eyes, he's waking me up "hold yourself dear, dont worry you can make it by yourself. i will ask my master, Mr. Goo, to find an easiest way to make it" he's rushing went to his master's room and came back with a big smile. ok dear, here i will lead you the way ...

“First thing you need to do is collect all the ingredients, no problem, you can find it everywhere. here’s the list”

1. Glue (in Indonesia, you can use Fox glue)
2. Corn starch (i used to call it maizena) 
3. Baby oil (for scent) 
4. Coloring

“Im not sure how to measure it, just use your sense, ok?” he continued. Here what i made after: 

• Combine 3 Tbs of corn starch, 1 Tbs of glue with 2 drops of baby oil in a bowl

• Use your bare hand or spoon to mix all together till combined well (if the dough still sticky, you can add more corn starch) 
• After you get a really good dough, you can add the coloring. (for how many drops do we need for the coloring, it depends on its quality)

Being Friendly Towards The Students - Yay or Nay? (Part 2)

We’ve talked about the meaning of being a real teacher and why we should to be one in the first part (click here). Now in the second part we are going to talk about the ways to profound the affection between the teachers and the students, and the benefits of being friendly towards them.

The first one, we need to be a Good Listener. Everyone want to be heard, whether it’s about the sadness or the happiness. Once a time, try to spare our time to listen to them. You’ll get surprised and cannot believe, by sparing 5 to 10 minutes of our time for them can increase the teacher-student relationship.

The second one, Talk to Them. we can just ask them about smallest things, like “how’s your day”, “have you eaten?”, ‘what did you just learn” and many more. In my school, i always try to get close to all of my students in every grade start from kindergarten to high school. Not just inside the class, we often have a conversation in our free time and sometimes it happens spontaniously. We meet by accident or they come to see me by purpose. We rarely have a heavy conversation, what we do just an easy chit chat or make a joke. 

The Third one is Appreciate Them. we need to aprreciate whatever they do, even it seems nothing for others, but as the teachers it should be a great thing. Every kid is different, they came from different background, different skills, and different behavior. In looking for their abillity, teachers need to be fair. Try to decrease our negative thoughts over them. There might a lot of naughty kids, but we should stop looking at their black side, we need to spot their white dots and bring it up to the surface so they will gain more confident and make them improve their skills.

Gwen Dewar, Ph.D said in Student-teacherrelationships:

Supportive student-teacher relationships are more than a charming social perk. Studies suggest they help kids adapt, learn, and achieve

Build Fine Motor Skills - Early Childhood Coloring Activity

Early childhood, start from 1 to 3 years old is called as the golden age which their cognitive, emotion, and social development improve in the fastest and greatest ways. In this period, the kids must be taught a lot of things in order to build their skills up especially for the motor skills. Motor skills are the ways of the body to improve the performance to be more complex, and it will continue for the entire life. The motor skills is divided into two classifications, there are Gross motor skills and fine motor skills.

Gross motor skills are the skills that require the large muscles movements, involve the entire body to engage the physical activities such as running, swimming, kicking, etc. Fine motor skills are those which require the small muscles, the coordination between the body muscles and the eyes. It can be trained in many ways such as moving an object, doodling, set the blocks, writing, etc. And with the combination of both skills, the children developments will be increase maximally. 

One of the fun ways to stimulate the fine motor skills is coloring activity.

Who doesn’t like coloring? Children really love this activity, they can set their imaginations free through the colors. They will be trained to distinguish colors, mix them together and create the new one. And soon or later, these abilities will help them to make many art creations along to their developmental age.

Now i will give an example of the coloring activity. Here i got my own nephew as the ‘experimental’ object. His name is Rafa, and he is 19 months old. He is a very active toddler and has a lot of energy. And whenever the energy burst, he will be doing many naughty activities which somehow will disturb us in some ways. That’s why as the adults we must know how to control it and channel the energy to the worthwhile activity.

Being Friendly Towards The Students - Yay or Nay? (Part 1)

I’ve been working in a private school for about 6 months, by the name itself we actually know how the school programs work. Private school means we got less government’s hands on us and run the school with our own creations based on well known and trusted programs.

It does mean we should take the examples from the developed countries that already got many great ways in teaching the kids. But not just the way in teaching, the way their teachers behave is something we shouldn’t miss.

Teacher, somebody who give almost all of their time and mind on the students just to make sure they will get enough help in making their future life

That’s how teachers in many developed countries work, they fall down deep into the student’s problems and sometimes unknowingly they’ve gone too far and get their life distracted, sacrifice their own life to save their beloved students. 

We can take the example from Jodi Schmidt, a teacher from Oakfield Elementary who saved her sick student named Natasha. Tasha had been missing the school over trips to the hospital for dialysis. Jodi couldn’t just sit and watch Tasya’s problem. She came up with a plan and decided to act. Eventually, she successfully made Tasya coming back to the school by donoring her own organ. Jodi gave us the truly meaning of helping a student. She’s willing to know what really happened to the student. She is one over millions in the world, hardly to find a great teacher like her nowadays because following her step is almost impossible.

 Jodi and Tasha

Then how to be at least a ‘mini’ Jodi who helped the student wholeheartedly? The basic thing is be their friend first, we must observe them, understand what they like, what they hate, and what kind of problems they’re facing off, and of course try our best to help them out.

But the next question is have we found those characteristics here on our teachers in Indonesia? Do they ever have that thought in their mind? Some might be do, but most of them don’t.