Newspapers Inspire Teachers to Create Fun Learning Time

Four groups of teachers were busy composing songs in the English language as part of a series of stiff competitions held during the two-day Newspapers in Education (NIE) teachers’ workshops in Sanur starting Monday morning.

“To compose a song, every group has to find inspiration and adjectives from cartoon strips in the newspapers,” directed Trisha Sertori, workshop facilitator.

After minutes of struggling, each of the groups presented and performed their songs happily and joyfully.

During the two-day workshops, teachers are being introduced to alternative English teaching methods by using materials from every page of a newspaper.

“We want you to share the methods in your classrooms to generate a creative, innovative learning atmosphere. You can ask your students to compose hip-hop songs from words in cartoons, they will come up with stunning songs,” Sertori suggested.

By encouraging students to work on topics they were interested in, they would learn English more enthusiastically, she said, adding that this was just one example from thousands of ideas using newspaper pages as a learning resource.

The workshops are part of Denpasar’s NIE Program, made available under the Partnership for Education Scheme of the Education and Culture Ministry, PT Chevron Pacific Indonesia and The Jakarta Post Foundation.

The Partnership for Education for the 2011/2012 academic year, which bears the theme “Bridge to the Future”, has been running since September 2011 and will complete by the end of June 2012.

The partnership covers 100 senior high schools and vocational schools in nine provinces — Riau, North Sumatra, Jakarta, West Java, Yogyakarta, Central Java, East Java, East Kalimantan and Bali.
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