KURIKULUM STANDARD SEKOLAH RENDAH TAHAP II (KSSR THP 2) 2014

Assalamualaikum wbt..

As people have acknowledged about KSSR which is now heading to its fourth year, many improvisations have been made in order to make it better for the kids and even for the teachers. After 3 years of teaching a KSSR class since 2011, yes..I can say that I'm satisfied with the results. The kids' competency in English improved after 3 years in ALL skills.

I am teaching in a primary school in a suburban area where the kids commonly hold the perception that English is not an important language to acquire... not even to learn. Some of them don't even want to further their study outside the home state because their ancestors (parents, aunts-uncles, grandparents) told them to study in colleges nearby because the state has everything they need so why should they study outside their hometown or state. But, hey... it's not the matter of where to study, it is a matter of what the kids would get if they study outside the 'circle' of the community they're living in. You might learn the same syllabus, get the same degree in any place you study in Malaysia but, the experience of living with people or living in places that are different from your hometown can give you priceless education for you to hold in your entire life. This education is the one that can shape you personally in how you perceive things, how you react and how you feel about something. OK let's get back to the main issue now..

In previous KBSR, I found out that here in this school, brighter kids acquire the WRITING skills quite well, not so much in READING and LISTENING skill, and quite bad in SPEAKING. Sadly they don't even want to speak with me in English, feel embarrassed to try, feel scared that they might make mistakes and so on. They could read but they read the text with wrong pronunciation. They listen only to English songs but not many. Even though it was in era of communicative language teaching, but in my case, my school... kids failed to communicate in English. They can't communicate in English. That was the brighter kids' cases, just imagine the kids with lower ability than them...

When I was asked to teach this new KSSR, I tried my best to teach them according to the curriculum and adapting some of the suggested activities to contextualize with the kids in my class. Alhamdulillah, all my efforts have paid off. Well, I will describe few things I did with the kids in their 3 years of learning English.

YEAR 1

• I taught them simple greetings, few sentences of asking permissions and questions, simple instructions. I asked them to use it whenever they wanted to speak with me.
• I taught them to spell aloud days and months EVERYDAY.
• I did BI LANGUAGE INSTRUCTIONS, I give instructions in both English and Malay. I kept my instructions SHORT and SIMPLE.
• I did a lot of spelling activities using vocabulary that they have learnt in previous Unit in the textbook.
• I taught them nursery rhymes and sing with them, accompanied by physical actions.
• I did story telling activities, in both English and Malay for EACH SENTENCE in the story so that they can understand the story and give me their feedback.
• I never missed to teach them the phonics and repeat the sound activities/games over and over again. Kids love the activities! :)
• I introduced to them English story books. I carefully chose books with more pictures and less words for them to see and read.
• I did the 'talaqi' system, where I asked them one by one to come and sit in front of me then read few sentences from a story book chose by them. 
• Whenever I asked them to flip over pages in the Textbook or Activity Book, I used number from 0-9. If I asked them to go to page 25, I would say, "Turn to page Two-Five." I just want to let them be familiar with the basic zero (0) to ten (10) before I further on with other numbers.

YEAR 2

• The kids began to use the simple greetings, they understood my simple instructions and they use English to ask permission from me. I started to ask more questions to them, like this:

"Teacher...please teacher, may I go out?"
"Where do you want to go?"
"Er...er... toilet."
"Ok, please do not run and do not play in the toilet, ya?"
"Erm...jangan lari eh teacher?"
Nod.
"Dengan... jangan main dalam tandas."
"Yes, my darling."
Giggle. Then they walk out.

"Teacher, I don't know this."
"You don't know HOW to do this?" (Stressing the word 'HOW' to let her know that she missed to use the word.)
"Yes, teacher."
"You have to put them into their group. See..it's different right..ada beza kan." (Pointing at the words to show the difference.)
"Ooo..kena letak ikut geng dia eh teacher...Yes! I know I know! Thank you teacher."
Smile.

• 70% of each lesson is conducted in BI LANGUAGE, Malay and English in order to get them familiarize with the English phrases/sentences I use. 
• I continued my phonic activities with them.
• I continued my 'talaqi' system and give them a band ranging from 1 to 4. From this, I can monitor my kids' reading competency and assist them whenever necessary.
• I did spelling activities, story telling activities and nursery rhymes singing activity. 
• I did a lot of  "Simon says.." games just to drill their listening skill.
• I still kept on asking them EVERYDAY to spell the days and months. I asked them to count 1-20.

YEAR 3
As printed on the textbook..yes.. I have to teach them GRAMMAR. Yes, my KBSR kids knew nothing about grammar when they were in Year 6 although grammar has been taught to them since they were in Year 3. So this time I knew I had to do things differently with them.

• I taught them grammar explicitly. I explained to them and tried to link the use of the grammar item to what they have learnt in Tatabahasa Bahasa Malaysia. Oh ya, sorry to say this but I explained grammar mostly in Malay, in order for them to really understand the usage of grammar.
• I continued most of the activities from previous years.
• I checked their reading ability and again marked them from Band 1-4. Top ten kids were selected and named 'Best Buddy' (ies). 'Best Buddy' (ies) got a pair of their friends and they have to monitor and correct the mistakes in the reading during the Reading Hour.
• I started the Spelling Bee activity, where they have to make more words from a longer word given. This activity can help them in making more and more words in their head, giving them more and more vocabulary to remember.
• I taught them question tags 'WH's and 'How' so that they know how to answer simple comprehension questions independently. I did translation activity for this in order for them to remember the question tags and understand the questions better.
• I taught them numbers 1-100. I started to use the numbers when asking them to flip over pages of the Textbook and the Activity Book. It worked really well as they have mastered the numbers up to 100 and they were confident to continue to count up to 200.
• After I finished the last Unit in the textbook, I started to teach them how to build simple sentences in present continuous tense.
• 40% of each lesson was conducted fully in English, 40% in BI LANGUAGE, 20% in Malay (explaining the grammar and some other things).
• I formed 3 big groups for them to do hands-on activities, language hunt, language games and competitions.
• My instructions for activities conducted were fully in English and they understood them pretty well.
• Some of them were beginning to borrow English kids' novel from the library. Some of them automatically go to the English books shelves and took a book there to read.
• Some of them did come to me and communicate with me in 'Manglish' (Malay-English) and some of them managed to speak in English with correct sentences!

At the end of Year 3, they haven't mastered English at the highest level but I can say that they performed well in each language skills taught. Not only that, they are quite confident in using English even when they were playing and role-playing the 'Restaurant' scene among themselves in the classroom during recess. I was quite surprised to see a dine-in menu made by the kids 100% in English! WELL DONE DARLINGS!!

And yes, SPPBS or the assessment record was and still, is the hardest part of all. Burdening, tiring and time consuming. Personally, I don't think SPPBS 'accumulated' result reflected the real English Language competency of the kids. We develop our 4 language skills at different levels. Some kids get higher band for reading but lower band in listening & speaking. Hence, they get the ACCUMULATED lower band just because they didn't achieve the higher band in listening & speaking. And sadly, it's hard to explain to the parents why the kids got lower band than other even though they can write or answer questions better than others.

For 2014, the way to assess kids is very much improved. We just fill in the assessment result in the Excel given by the Lembaga Peperiksaan Malaysia (LPM). The kids will get different bands for different language skills. I'm pretty happy for that. But, there are numbers of issue being brought up by teachers who need quantitative result and ranking from the assessment. Well, let's just go with the flow and see the flaw later. Then we figure out the solutions.

I didn't get the transfer, sadly to say that. But this will be the chance for me to continue my project with these kids and try to prove to other people that English KSSR works really well and we produce better kids than before.

Wasalam.

note: If you guys have anything to add, to give comments or anything at all, please do so. :)