Studying Media Literacy: Kids Take on Gender Stereotypes in Advertising

I’d tell him to make his own darn coffee!” one sixth grader quipped, in response to viewing a black-and-white Folgers coffee television ad from the 1960s. In it, a perky young wife serves her husband a cup of coffee with a chipper, “Your coffee, sir.” The husband, after taking a sip, grimaces and complains, “How can such a pretty wife make such bad coffee?” “I heard that!” pouts the wife, who then pays a visit to her older and wiser neighbor, Mrs. Olson, who introduces her to Folgers “mountain grown coffee.” Now armed with the Folgers, the wife tries again, serving her husband with another obedient, “Your coffee, sir.” The husband sips, this time exclaiming, “How can such a pretty wife make such great coffee?!”

COVID-19 in Utah Valley

The second week of March 2020 presented an array of unique challenges for me both professionally and personally as I adjusted my work and home life to cope with the COVID-19 virus. I had already been ailing with what (I hoped) were seasonal allergies that left me coughing, bleary-eyed, and wondering if I might be sick with COVID-19 prior to the announcements from our university and school district that we should start self-isolating and preparing for at-home instruction. As both of my children at home are competitive gymnasts, we faced another decision about whether to keep them home from training. As my work and personal email boxes began filling with announcements from my university, my department, my children’s school, my children’s gym, and even my church and extended out-of-state family, I had to fight back a growing sense of anxiety about the outside world as I looked after my physical recovery. Staying home from work, just as a symbolic gesture, made a lot of sense to me. I’d already afflicted my colleagues with my occasional coughing from my isolated office way down the corridor, but I didn’t want to leave anything to chance. Although I presumed my odds of having COVID-19 were small after three trips to the doctor in the last month for secondary infections resulting from my allergies, who really knew? So, from my home office, I put into practice the skills I learned from doing remote instruction over the last several years. Up until the present challenge, I had tried to access my email only in the morning and afternoon. As news and instructions came in from my university and department, email communication became a near-constant distraction/source of information. Following our university’s lead, our college moved to all-remote instruction and social isolating. This meant moving to the Zoom video conferencing app. Fortunately, I was quite familiar with the app, so I didn’t have too hard a transition. However, at least a few of my colleagues had to make substantial changes to what and how they taught. Moreover, our students varied widely in how familiar and comfortable they were with the online interface. They valued our programs for their face-to-face emphasis, and now they were being asked to adjust everything about their experience within days. Moreover, most of my students are educational professionals themselves, so they were scrambling to provide direction and services to their own students. In the days following the university’s move to all-remote instruction, I participated in several instructional and organizational meetings with administrators and colleagues to ensure we were all in accord about the adjustments we would make to classes, and I spent hours on email coordinating with students and responding to their personal and professional concerns. I greatly reduced planned whole-group instruction in favor of individual consultation. I felt frustration at my students as they requested that I take my class instruction down to the basics. As I was teaching a course on qualitative research methods, I already felt I was barely touching on the tip of the iceberg as it was. How more stripped down could I get? At the same time, I was still recovering physically from (what I hoped were) my allergies, so I recognized that some of my frustration was my body demanding time to recover. To add to the challenges/opportunities of the first week into this at-home learning experiment, I had my two elementary-aged children at home with their own learning needs to consider. Even as I type, my third grader (who has an IEP) is in my office with me on i-Ready doing her daily math lesson on my university-issued iPad while my wife works with our sixth grader on her laptop. I find myself dividing my time between my third grader and my professional work, and I feel like neither is getting the attention they deserve. And yet, in the midst of the chaos, things are happening. Our children are getting more one-on-one time than they have in quite a while. They’re happy and adjusting. I wonder about their peers. My children attend a Title I school, and many of their parents and caregivers don’t have access to the same remote learning resources as they do. Many don’t have parents at home to supervise the well-organized instruction their teachers have provided (almost miraculously) via Google Classroom. It’s a strange new world in these early quarantine days, and I’m sure there are many opportunities and challenges ahead.

Evaluasi Buku Teks Bahasa Inggris “Stairway: A Fun and Easy English Book” Grade VI Elementary School

Choosing a suitable coursebook is not an easy task since coursebook is a key component in most language program. It serves as language input and language practice for learners. It provides the basis for content lesson, the skills taught and the variety of language practice for learner, it also serves as a supplement for teacher’s instruction. The variety of coursebook are available to use by teacher for their classroom. However, teacher need to know the strength and the weakness of the coursebook so that they can choose the best coursebook for their classroom. This study aimed to evaluate coursebook entitled Stairway: A Fun and Easy English Book for sixth grader of Elementary school. The evaluation using the list of criteria of coursebook from Cunningsworth. This study is qualitative descriptive since this study aimed to give the details information about a phenomenon in this case is the coursebook. The result of this study showed that the coursebook entitled Stairway: A Fun and Easy English Book is suitable to use with some adaptation. The result obtained from the suitability from the book with the criteria given. From 44 items of criteria, the book has suitability on 28 criteria or 63% suitability. Accordingly, the book can be used with some adaptation to minimize the weakness in the book. Keywords: ELT Coursebook, Evaluation, Suitability.

Historicity of Ecocriticism and Ecocritical History: An Introductory Overview

Overlapping and interconnected, interdisciplinary and heterogeneous, amorphous and multi-layered, and deep and broad as it is, countless topics on ecoliterature make ecocriticism a comprehensive catchall term that proposes to look at a text--be it social, cultural, political, religious, or scientific--from naturalist perspectives and moves us from “the community of literature to the larger biospheric community which […] we belong to even as we are destroying it” (William Rueckert). As I was in the middle of writing and researching for this article, I was struck by a piece of nature writing by an eleven year old sixth grader born to his (South Asian and American) mixed parents, both affiliated with Johns Hopkins and already proud to belong to the extended family of a Nobel Laureate in Physics. The young boy, Rizwan Thorne-Lyman, wrote, as his science story project, an incredibly beautiful essay, “A Day in the Life of the Amazon Rainforest.” Reading about the rainforest was one of his interests, I was told. In describing the day-long activities of birds and animals among the tall trees and small plants, the 2 pp.-long narrative actually captures the eternally continuing natural cycle of the Amazon. The budding naturalist’s neat classification of the wild life into producers (leafy fruit and flowering plants and trees), consumers (caimans/crocodiles, leafcutter ants, capuchin monkey), predators (macaws, harpy eagles, jaguars, green anaconda), decomposers (worms, fungi and bacteria), parasites (phorid flies) and scavengers (millipedes) was found to be unforgettably impressive. Also the organization of the essay into the Amazon’s mutually benefitting and organically functioning flora and fauna during the day--sunrise, midday, and sunset--was unmistakably striking. I congratulated him as an aspiring environmentalist specializing in rain forest. I encouraged him that he should try to get his essay published in a popular magazine like Reader’s Digest (published did he get in no time indeed![i]) and that he should also read about (and visit) Borneo in Southeast Asia, home to other great biodiverse rainforests of the world. I called him “soft names” as a future Greenpeace and Environmental Protection leader and theorist, a soon-to-be close friend of Al Gore’s. The promising boy’s understanding, however short, of the Amazon ecology and ecosystem and the biological phenomena of its living organisms was really amazing. His essay reminded me of other famous nature writings, especially those by Fiona Macleod (see below), that are the pleasure of those interested in the ecocriticism of the literature of place--dooryards, backyards, outdoors, open fields, parks and farms, fields and pastures, and different kinds of other wildernesses. [i] https://stonesoup.com/post/a-day-in-the-life-in-the-amazon-rainforest/

TEACHING VOCABULARY USING FLASHCARD

Vocabulary learning and teaching has been considered as one of the most important mechanisms of any educational program since early. Teachers have been using many techniques to help the learners to develop their knowledge of vocabularies in quality and quantity. There are many media in teaching vocabulary, one of them is by using flashcard. Flashcard is one of media which can help the teacher to teaching English easily. Flash cards in teaching vocabulary are very simple visual aids and the teacher can make the students more active during the teaching learning process. The study was conducted to find out the effect of flashcard on the vocabulary of the sixth graders of elementary school. This study employed a pre-experimental research design with one group pretest and posttest. An the research method used in this research is quantitative research with experimental research method. The subject consisted of 29 students of the sixth grader class of SDN Rengasdengklok Selatan 2 in the academic year of 2017/2018. Data collection techniques used in this study is a test. The procedures of collecting data are pretest, treatment and posttest. The data were analyzed using the SPSS 21.0. Based on the analysis, the mean score in pre-test was 66.21 improve to 79.55 in post-test. The result of t-test showed that significant 2-tailed was lower than 0.05 (0.000 < 0.05). It can be said that H0 is rejected, it means that there is effect of flashcard to the vocabulary of the sixth graders in SDN Rengasdengklok Selatan 2

ANALISIS PERKEMBANGAN KOGNITIF TERCAPAI PADA SISWA USIA DASAR

Abstrak Penelitian ini membahas tentang perkembangan kognitif siswa usia sekolah dasar, salah satu siswa kelas VI MI Ma’arif Krakal yang tercapai. Perkembangan merupakan proses berkesinambungan yang dimulai sejak dalam kandungan hingga mencapai dewasa. Dalam proses perkembangan inilah, individu akan melewati tiap tahap perkembangan untuk mencapai dewasa. Penelitian ini termasuk dalam penelitian kualitatif yang bersifat deskriptif. Pendekatan dalam penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan induktif, karena sebelum melakukan penelitian, peneliti berangkat ke lapangan untuk mengumpulkan berbagai bukti melalui penelaahan terhadap fenomena, dan berdasarkan hasil penelaahan itu peneliti merumuskan teori dan fokus penelitian. Data diperoleh dari hasil wawancara observasi dan dokumentasi lapangan. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan adanya siswa telah mencapai perkembangan kognitif, hal tersebut dapat dilihat melalui prestasi raport yang telah diraih. Salah satu hal yang mendukung perkembangan kognitif aadalah faktor lingkungan, dalam hal ini lingkungan keluarga sangat mempengaruhi pola perkembangan anak untuk menentukan cita-cita bagi dirinya.Kata Kunci: Perkembangan Kognitif, Siswa, Tercapai Abstract This research discuss about cognitive development in elementary school age, one of sixth grader of Ma’arif Krakal Islamic Elementary School (MI) achieved. Development is continuous process which start from womb until adult. In this development process, every individual will pass every step of development to be adult. This research included in descriptive qualitative research. Approach in this research used inductive research, because before did research, researcher went to field to collect evidences by reviewing phenomena. Based on that reviewing result, researcher formulate theory and research focus. Data obtained by interview, observation, and field documentation. The result of this research showed that there were students already achieve cognitive development, it can be seen by achieving report score. One of supporting thing in cognitive development is environtment factor. In this case is family scope which very influence pattern of children development to determine their dreamsKeywords: cognitive development, student, achieve