Youth Speak! Fun Day kicks off today
The Jakarta Post Foundation’s Youth Speak! Fun Day preliminary rounds for debates, a spelling bee and news-reading contests kicks off on Thursday (today) at SMKN 3 on Jl. Tirtanadi No. 19, Denpasar.
“Hosting such a fun event is a very good opportunity for our school’s students and teachers to be more familiar with the practice of English language, not only in the classroom,” SMKN 3 teacher coordinator Ida Bagus Gede Sutarja told Bali Daily on Wednesday.
He was speaking on the sidelines of the Youth Speak! Fun Day technical meeting, a day prior to the commencement of the first English festival co-hosted by the country’s most prestigious English newspaper, The Jakarta Post, the Education and Culture Ministry, the Denpasar Mayoralty and US oil company Chevron.
Bagus said that the vocational school, which has around 1,300 students and 90 teachers, had put a high priority on the importance of English skills among its students and teachers through, for example, a sister-school agreement with a school in Perth, Australia, specially designed for improving English among its teachers.
SMKN 3 will be providing five classrooms, two meeting rooms and two restaurant-simulation rooms for the two-day preliminaries for the debate, spelling bee and news-reading on Thursday and Friday.
“This is such a rare event we really don’t want to miss it; we will not dismissing our students [who don’t have classrooms]. They will continue their class activities in other forms,” said Bagus, adding that 28 students of the school would be deployed as liaison officers, while some others would take part in the debate, song-writing and news-reading competitions.
For the entire three-day event, around 300 student volunteers from some 30 schools in Denpasar will also assist the festival.
As of Wednesday, a total of 81 students had registered in the news-reading contest, making it the most participated competition of the festival, while 36 students will compete in the spelling bee and 14 teams each consisting of three students will engage in debates.
As many as 44 students have registered to compose song lyrics and music, 73 in photography and 60 in writing contests that will be hosted on the festival’s final day, Saturday.
