Improving students' writing by brain gym activities in classroom action research

Teaching English to young learners is an exciting thing. Teachers have to think about the various ways to teach them that can make them easy to understand the language. Talking about language, especially English cannot be separated from the four language skills which are very important. Those skills are Speaking, Reading, Writing and Listening. For young learners, writing seems to be the difficult thing that has to be mastered. They always run out of idea because their both sides of the brain are still not perfectly connected. Therefore the writer decided to teach her own students using new method that is called Brain Gym. Brain Gym will help the students to connect the left and right hemisphere of the brain so that they are able to concentrate more. By doing the activities in Brain Gym students are able to create a good writing with the enjoyable activities. Since the writer wanted to improve her students’ ability in writing, she conducted this research to find out this problem: “Does Brain Gym improve the students’ writing achievement?” In conducting the study, the writer used Classroom Action Research with single group pre-test and post-test. She used this kind of method since she did the research for her own classroom in a children English course. First, for the pre-test the students were asked to make a composition. Then the lessons were done as usual. On the next meeting, the students were given a treatment of Brain Gym before the lesson was started. At the last meeting the students would be given a post-test which was the same as the pre-test. In every meetings, the writer as the teacher herself wrote some notes that would be important in her own journals. After that there would be two kinds of data that were analyzed: students’ score and teacher’s journals. After analyzing the data, the writer found that there was a significant improvement on the students’ writing achievement. It means that Brain Gym really helps the students to compose a good and creative writing