End of Term 4 Reflections

Fourth term is just about to finish; just one more week to go. It has flown by so quickly! As I’ve written several times, this term I focused on the traditional tale, Kancil & Buaya. During the last holidays our hub group met to adapt the story so that the vocabulary in the story was largely comprehensible for our students as well as introducing a few new structures. I think we did a great job with it and although much longer than any of our previous stories, was enjoyed by my year R – 6 students. 

My tweaked adapted version: 

Kancil berjalan kaki ke sungai.

Kancil lihat mangga di sebelah sungai.

Kancil lapar dan mau makan mangga.

Kancil tidak bisa berenang.

Kancil lihat banyak buaya di sungai.

Kancil lihat banyak buaya lapar di sungai.

Bagaimana kancil bisa makan mangga?

Kancil berkata, “Halo Buaya! Ada berapa buaya di sungai?”

Buaya berkata, “Tidak tahu!”

Kancil berkata, “Saya manu menghitung. Ayo buaya, antri.”

Buaya antri.

Kancil melompat dari buaya ke buaya dan menghitung.

Satu, dua, tiga, empat, lima, enam, tujuh, delapan, sembilan, sepuluh.

Kancil berlari dan tertawa.

Kancil makan mangga.

Buaya marah.

Kancil terlalu pandai.

Isn’t that an awesome adaptation? The vocabulary for the original story was so complicated! It is so rewarding to turn an incomprehensible story into a comprehensible story! 

I then parred  the story down even further for junior primary students. Their simplified version looked like this:

Kancil berjalan kaki.

Kancil lihat mangga.

Kancil mau makan mangga.

Kancil lihat buaya.

Kancil berkata, “Saya mau menghitung buaya. Ayo buaya, antri.”

Buaya antri.

Kancil melompat dari buaya ke buaya dan mengitung.

Satu, dua, tiga, empat, lima, enam, tujuh, delapan, sembilan, sepuluh.

Kancil makan mangga.

Kancil senang sekali.

Each week, I focused on a new structure from the above story and incorporated it into the JP story. It became an embedded reading! The most useful structure was undoubtedly ‘tidak tahu’. What a great phrase! I love how students have acquired ‘tidak tahu’ so thoroughly and use it appropirately in conversations!

My major reflection regarding this story is that it would be a great story for first term when we have 11 weeks rather than fourth term which is more like an 8 week term! There is so much potential for this story. I feel like we barely skimmed the surface of its potential.

To finish up the terms work, students did a free write and played the word chunk game last week and then this week I am going to experiment with Kahoot! using my 6 ipads. I have created a 20 question game to review the story. Feel free to open Kahoot! and search for Kancil dan Buaya. While there, have a look at the Dadar Gulung review game I made for my 6/7’s. It was such a success! It turned a group of year 7’s who are too cool for school, around last week. They begged to play it 3 times!! The amount of repetition was awesome. I did have a few connectivity issues which I emailed Kahoot! about. They have replied already, so I will discuss their comments with our IT guru tomorrow to see what needs to be done before Tuesdays lessons.