Inter-House Games

On the 25th of May, 2012, CmPS Project WISH organized an Inter-House Game within our school.

A peak at the initial planning stage!

The Inter-House Games are essentially a series of games students can participate in to win points for their house.  Individual games are each organized separately by a select number of student groups—this year, however, we were the only CmPS group granted permission to organize an IHG. We opted for a popular favourite- an Amazing Race style IHG.

Our aim in organizing it was to spread awareness about butterflies within the school population, and to promote our butterfly garden in school.  

And so the Amazing Race became a Butterfly-Themed-Amazing-Race. Our tactical approach to this conundrum was to make the each station related to butterflies.  For those of you unfamiliar with modern-day television, an Amazing Race is basically a race in which there are a number of teams with a series of stations to complete.  Only upon each station’s completion are the teams given a clue, which once solved will direct them to the next station.

However given a number of constraints, we devised a points system so as to allow the game to suit the House system. So, a simplified explanation on the operation of our IHG:  there are five teams, each representing the five houses.  There are a number of stations, each staffed by a station manager.  Each station houses a game or task, and teams are assigned points by the station manager based on their performance.  It is only upon completion of each separate game/task by the teams to the station managers’ satisfaction that they are given a clue directing them to the next station.

And that’s the logistical side of it.

Our purpose in organising this IHG was to raise awareness about butterflies. 

Pre-IHG briefing

In the pre-IHG briefing, we gave them a presentation about the importance of urban nature in Singapore, as well as the role butterflies play. They then went on to prove their newly-earned knowledge in various games and challenges.
  

 The stations:

Kate's and Zek Min's station: the Koi Pond

Each group started from a different station. Kate's station was called 'Rapid Fire' where participants would have to answer as many questions as possible within the time limit of 10 minutes. We were glad to observe that most of them had absorbed the content of the briefing.  

Zhang Xuan's and Beverley's station was titled 'Caterpillar Games' and served to evaluate the teams on their teamwork.  The station was set up such that there were thirty individually numbered leaves placed around a given area in a random order.  The participants formed a line before being blindfolded and left in the hands of a selected team leader, whose job it was to direct the group in completing a circuit of fifteen leaves in as little time as possible.  This circuit was determined by the station mistress, who would call out a number and wait for the group to travel to the corresponding leaf before calling out the next number.  Teams were assessed based on station mistresses' observations regarding their team work as well as on the time it took for them to complete the activity.

Zhang Xuan and Beverley's station: outside the KS Chee Theatre

For Yuexin's station, the participants were given a map and tasked to identify the locations of the butterfly plants in our school within a given time frame. This activity aimed to promote awareness of the different types of butterfly plants, especially so in our school community itself. 

Yuexin's station: on the track

Shayna's station is called 'Matching'. The participants have to match the names of the butterflies to the respective pictures. 

And finally, our IHG was set apart from past years’ by a very special touch—a last combined station.  No points, no death and glory and honour for your house—just a last station where all the teams gathered together in harmony to...

Richardson house planting their own plant

Do gardening!

Ownership is tremendously important for urban nature to be fully integrated by individuals into modern society.  It’s much easier to do something when you care about it.  On a smaller scale, ownership is key for our butterfly garden to continue to thrive in our absence in about two years’ time.

Gardening under the hot sun

                                                         

The idea was to have students of the school be part of the little urban nature/butterfly awareness project we have going on here.  That they be made aware of the importance of urban nature and the importance of butterflies in urban nature, and care about it.  And so the finishing line of the race was our school butterfly garden.  Each team planted a butterfly plant in representation of their house.  Each plant stands there as something that each house has done, has helped happen, and we hope that this has instilled a sense of ownership in the students. 

                                     

 

 

The main goal of our project can be summarised in five simple words: we want people to care.  And hopefully we’ll have accomplished that with this group of seventy or so students; yes, it’s not a lot of people, but it’s still seventy more people than there was before.  Seventy more people spreading the gospel.

Wang You giving the post-IHG debrief

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Updates

Recently, our schoolmates spotted a rather interesting scene at our school butterfly garden and one of them has kindly taken a photo of the cute scene (see below):  

A lizard sunbathing on the signs we put up at our school butterfly garden! Isn't it cute?

We have also finished designing our shirt and poster for a programme we're organising in collaboration with the Singapore Science Centre (credit goes to Kate).

The front and back designs of our shirt respectively. We have chosen the colour maroon as the T-shirt will be used for slightly more formal occasions. Poster to promote our workshop we are conducting @ Science Centre this June! Now we will be waiting for our designs to be approved by the school before further negotiating with the supplier. More updates soon!

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Meeting People. (Well, person.)

So we met up with the wonderful Mrs. Edith Flores Wolff from Germany. She has given us a good many ideas on how we can raise greater awareness of our project through creative means. 

But first, a little background information (or promotion, if you will) on/for Mrs. Wolff and her project (or what we can make of it).  It's called The Asia Europe Classroom Network, but we're involved in an aspect of it that concerns butterflies. Mrs. Wolff has worked with schools all across the globe, literally, and through this and her passion for butterflies she has amassed and shared with us a generous wealth of ideas which we are considering for our project.

These ideas include but are definitely not limited to:
- Colourful signs with butterfly pictures/quotes around the school to catch people's attention and raise awareness.  This is mostly to raise awareness about and expand out butterfly garden in school.
- Something about mandelas-- which are something like stained glass designs on paper.  We're considering incorporating this into our Science Centre programme.
- Butterfly puppets.  Glow in the dark puppets.

Also, she clarified the issue about the consolidation of butterfly species in a book.  There seems to be an issue regarding the translation of the scientific names of butterflies into Singapore's native languages, Chinese and Malay.  She brought to our attention a group of students in Germany who managed to translate the butterfly names into German.  Collation of host plants and teaching students how to identify them through books also came up.

She very kindly brought us gifts from the Philippines: these handmade key chains which are really pretty:

And we gave her this shirt that was very kindly prepared by a previous member of the group:

We gave her a tour of our butterfly garden, and she pointed out several other butterfly host plants scattered around the school.  She pointed out several other areas where our butterfly garden could potentially be expanded to.

Mrs. Lee with Mrs. Wolff

 Following this, we led both Mrs. Lee an Mrs. Wolff to the butterfly garden at Nassim Road and  the butterfly garden at Dhoby Ghaut Green. When we reached the garden, we were pleased to observe a butterfly, a Cruiser butterfly, which we hadn't seen before in the garden during the butterfly surveys. We are pleased to report that the garden is very active, more active than it has been for the past three or so surveys.

And we remain, Mrs. Wolff, most fondly yours,
Project W.I.S.H

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Butterfly Garden updates

The signs for the butterfly garden are up. Hopefully this will raise awareness about the existence of our garden, as well as prevent people from picking the flowers or disturbing the plants.

Zhang Xuan and Yuexin at work in the D&T lab

Our sign (: drawn by our resident artist Wang You!

'Do Not Fog'!

Unfortunately it has come to our attention that recently, our school has hired an external vendor to carry out fogging regularly every week in school. Needless to say, fogging is detrimental to the health of the many caterpillars on our plants.

This was initiated in response to parent/student complaints about the mosquitoes in the area, so we hope that the 'Do Not Fog' sign will keep them away from our butterfly garden.

Ms Tan Beng Chiak, a Biology teacher from our school, has told us about the fogging policy and according to the policy, fogging is meant to be used only in cases of an outbreak. A few cases can hardly be considered 'an outbreak', and weekly fogging will very likely worsen the situation, as:

1. It will pollute the air; the area nearby has many classrooms with many Year 1s and other classes taking place there;
2. It will harm or even kill many plants in the area and there are a lot nearby J-Block;
3. The mosquitoes can simply fly away during the fogging and return after it ends, but sedentary creatures such as caterpillars will be stuck on the plants, unable to escape;
4. The mosquitoes may grow resistant to the fog after prolonged exposure.

Hence we do plan to write to the estate department in our school to see if fogging in the future can be perhaps kept away from the garden. Fogging is a major issue not only with regards to our school garden but also to butterfly populations in Singapore in general, especially in urban areas.  It is impossible to maintain a butterfly garden when any butterflies and caterpillars that manage to be there are systematically and periodically killed off once every week.

Not only that, there must be some other environmentally friendly and more feasible solution to this mosquito issue. Why not launch a campaign to minimize stagnant water around the area to ensure that there are no breeding sites for the mosquitoes? Fogging is merely addressing the problems caused by this issue and not its roots, and is a very short-term solution.

In the meantime it has been suggested that we conduct a, and we quote, "search and rescue", for any caterpillars that might somehow still be alive.

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Repotting Part 3 & Butterfly Survey 5

This was our third phase of our repotting project, and we are pleased to say that our garden is making lovely progress.

Apart from that, we added strong poles as suport for some of the younger and weaker crownflower plants so that they will grow straight. In a few weeks time, they will be strong enough that they won't require the poles, but until then, they are vulnerable to being knocked over by the regular winds and rain prevalent in our climate.

Afterwards, we went to conduct our butterfly survey. Due to the impending rain and the weather, there were not many butterflies, but it was indeed interesting to see the garden in a different mood, with all the insects getting ready to take cover from the strong rain.

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Bubble Tea Sale and Butterfly Garden check

So we had our bubble tea sale today, a fundraiser that we also hope will generate interest in our project amongst our school.

At 6:50AM, we collected the bubble tea from the Dunman school vendor. There were 250 cups, the entirety of which we managed to sell.

Below is a photo of us after fundraising, counting the money we made:

In total, we made a profit of about $200, to be used to buy more butterfly host and nectar plants for our school garden.

During the CmPS meeting with Mrs Lee, we were thinking of other more prominent alternative locations for the expansion of our butterfly garden, and one suggestion was the shelves of plants in between the KS Chee Theatre and the canteen. We checked on our garden and were happy to find about twelve caterpillars on one plant. We think that the caterpillars are the young of the Plain Tiger butterfly, but we are not sure, hence we plan to email photos to Mr Anuj to check.

Sadly, there are aphids on most of the bloodflower plants, too many to cut off.  The temporary measure of wiping majority of them off was taken, but we plan to find an eco-friendly spray that will get rid of the aphids more or less permanently, so that they will not harm our plants.

Caterpillars of the Plain Tiger butterfly on a Blood Flower plant

A Plain Tiger feeding from the flower of the Blood Flower Plant

More caterpillars.
Notice the small orange caterpillar

More more caterpillars.

The small yellow specks on the stalks of the flowers are the aphids. They're on most of the Blood Flower plants.

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Repotting Part 2

Beverley, Wang You and Zek Min continued our repotting project, as part of our efforts to rejuvenate our school garden.

Wang You and Zek Min digging the soil.

To our surprise, the healthy plants we replotted last week are all drooping and the flowers are all gone! We plan to ask Mr Anuj for advice as to why the plants are not faring well, and how to counter that.

Beverley and Zek Min digging the soil.

Beverley and Wang You carefully relocating the lantana plant.

We did not finish repotting as we felt that we should observe how the plants' growth are affected by the repotting. Hopefully, the new plants will fare better in this plot of garden.

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Repotting Part 1

We did some work on our school gardens recently (23rd Feb), repotting some of the plants which we had bought but hadn't had time to plant properly yet. Most of plants had thrived where we had left them, especially the Snakeweed plants, which shot up despite little tending.

We managed to repot 3 Snakeweed plants (Stachytarpheta indica) and 2 Wedelia biflora in about an hour. Below are some of the photos taken.

We spotted a cocoon on one of the Wedelia plants, to much joy!

Wang You and Kate busy repotting.

The soil was exceptionally packed and hard to dig that morning.

Carefully cutting the plant out from its plastic binds without damaging the roots.

Wang You repotting a Wedelia plant.

One of the many, many, MANY earthworms we saw that morning. Earthworms improve the quality of the soil, though, so that's good news.

More repotting, this time with Wang You, Vivian and Kate.

Zek Min posing in between digging.

One of our repotted plants!

A huge rock that was in the way of the hole we were digging. Finally managed to get it out.

Given the current speed of our progress, with a bit of work put in on Wednesday after our CmPS meeting we ought to be able to complete the repotting by next Thursday.

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