(Event 1)
In term 2, our K2 children were involved in the “Start Small Dream Big President’s Challenge Charity Project”. The President’s Challenge represents a coming together of people from all walks of life. In partnership with ECDA, they initiated this project to encourage even the young ones to give back to the community. Hence, we sent letters to inform the parents that to raise funds for this charity initiative our school would be conducting a workshop on growing herbal plants in recycled plastic bottles.
We invited the parents to join their children to participate in the workshop and requested them to send recycled bottles to school for this workshop. Parents sent the plastic bottles to school through their children and we were able to collect more than enough bottles for our first event. Once collected, it took about a week for children to show their creativity by decorating their own bottles under their class teacher’s supervision. Children couldn’t wait for the actual day to arrive as they were so excited. We had already contacted and had a pre-visit by N parks specialist beforehand regarding the launch party and first event. We were very delighted to see the response from the parents as they were full of support for the event. All the arrangements and preparations were done by teachers and children together for this day. On the 3rd of April, we set up different stations for children and parents to carry out a hands-on workshop to follow a step by step guide together to do bottle gardening. Upon arrival, our principal, Madam Santi Devi, gave a speech to welcome parents who attended the workshop. Following the speech, the workshop was conducted by Ms Joanne from N parks on basic gardening about how to grow and take care of herbal plants. She involved the parents by showing them slides and asking open-ended questions. After that, parents moved from station to station with their children to do bottle planting. For example, at station 1 they put soil in the pot, at station 2 they put a herbal plant in the soil and at station 3 they watered the plant. Finally, at station 4, the children sold the plants to their parents in order to raise funds for the charity.
Parents were very excited and appreciated the organisation of this workshop to allow them the privilege to come together with their children and spend quality time with them, while at the same time giving back to the community. We are very glad that we were able to raise close to one thousand dollars for the charity. The children had a wonderful time doing this activity together with their parents. It was a meaningful and successful event. Both children and parents were inspired from this workshop to continue growing bottled plants at home, and some of them even shared pictures with us.
