Picnic+at+Botanic+Gardens

//A Trip to Botanic Garden// **
 * Biology Journal

Last Thursday, on the 22 nd of April 2010, the three RaM classes—311, 313 & 315 went to Singapore’s Botanic Gardens to enjoy a self-prepared picnic as well as to observe and complete work for both Biology and Physics.

Out of the three exercises for the three different subjects, the only one that required prior preparation was English where we were split into groups. Each group had to decide on a theme and ready a picnic for one other group to taste and review. For us, the five of us chose the theme of ‘Rainbows’ with the focus on the seven colors of the rainbow. For each color, we decided on a food type. This proved difficult as most of the food, with the exception of fruits, are normally colored and fall outside the seven colors we wanted to present. However, serving plain fruits would have been too mundane for our liking. Despite posting said question up on Yahoo! Answers, the responses were not ideal. However, in the end, we did managed to make our decisions.

On the day itself, after setting down our picnic mats and resisting the temptation to set ourselves down upon the plastic sheets and devouring our food, we made our way up the slopes to measure the surface area of a tree and...yup, count the number of leaves on the tree. While three of our group tackled the leaf, the other two of us craned our necks to stare up at the tree, which though thin and stunted, was still much, much taller than either of us. The task of counting the number of leaves did not appear as insane as it originally did once we really thought about it. Also, there were questions provided to guide us along. After a brief hassle about the disposal of the leaf which we unfortunately contaminated with pale purple marker ink, we set back to organize our food and listen to the pre-recorded bird calls.

What amazed me most about the bird calls was the fact that we could actually differentiate the different calls as well as match the songs to the sonograms printed on the worksheets. For someone like me who is exposed to few, if not one, kind of call on a daily basis, that was a pleasant change.

All in all, I feel that this visit was really a memorable one, including the leaving the campus during school hours part. Although this is not the first time I’ve gone out with a class, this was unique in the sense that we had to play our part in organizing the trip in terms of preparation for the picnic. No longer did we sit back and let the teachers do all the work—we had a say and the ability to judge and decide for ourselves. Furthermore, the not-tight schedule was also relaxing for us, seeing that we were not required to rush from one place to another to complete the tasks assigned. We were able to do things at our own pace, talk a little, enjoy the food and greenery. I do hope that we would get another chance to repeat this activity for it indeed was a wonderful experience.

Time to rest my poor, overworked eyes and mind, stop staring at simply gorgeous Code Geass wallpapers while feeling sad over all those tragic deaths, and get some early sleep. Yup, that sounds really heavenly...celestial...