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.