A new year and new semester greeted ETA Gabriel “Gabe” Umland upon his return to SMAN 1 Cerme after the Mid-Year Enrichment Conference in Jakarta. Gabe and his co-teacher, Bu Nurul, came back from MYEC a stronger team than ever and set out to make their final semester together their best one yet.

Lessons in January began with “narrative text”, a topic fitting for the upcoming WORDS storytelling and storybook competition.

As a result of the upcoming competition, Bu Nurul and Gabe have made an effort to incorporate storytelling into all of their “narrative text” lessons to help inspire students to participate in the WORDS competition. One particularly successful lesson, pictured here, began with a running dictation activity. In this activity, students were presented with three different synopses of popular stories, such as Harry Potter, Pinocchio, and Cinderella. Students had to work in teams to copy down entire texts by having one student ran to the board to read the text and then ran back to their teammate who would write down what they dictated.

This activity was followed by an activity where students had to unscramble popular fairytales and analyze the different parts of the story. The lesson was well received by students and got everyone excited about what was to come in the next five months.

Gabriel “Gabe” Umland is currently teaching at SMAN 1 Cerme, East Java.