[Media Invite] Gardens By The Bay - The Garden Troopers! (Junior Horticulturists)

This is a monthly post on 'Educational Places'. Every 4th week of the month I will post on local educational places we have brought AJ to.

Jan - The Coins & Notes Museum
Feb - The NEWater Plant
Mar - Gardens By The Bay - The Cloud Forest
Apr - Gardens By The Bay - The Flower Dome
May - The Changi Museum
Jun - Human Body Experience & Nature's Design Exhibition @ Singapore Science Centre
Jul - Literary Trail: In Search of the Missing Heirloom in Katong
Aug - Fun For Free Sg: Gardens By The Bay - The Supertree Grove
Sep - Damnoensaduak Floating Market & Maeklong Railway Market (Bangkok)


When I was staying with my late mother in her 3-room HDB flat, she had a tidy row of plants along the corridor.  Nobody complained, because the neighbours love plants too.  I did help her to water her plants, but my affection towards them didn't grow.  So I grew up believing that I do not have green fingers, butter fingers I have, green, nope.

But I can't shun away from this topic for long.  Next year onwards, AJ will have an additional subject to study in school: Science, & studying of plants is included, needless to say!

Ministry of Education Science Syllabus for Primary Students

Though I did bring AJ to Gardens by the Bay a few times to learn more about plants,  he didn't have any hands-on activities with plants before.  How glad I was to get an invite to Gardens By The Bay - The Garden Troopers! programme where AJ could role play as a Junior Horticulturist!

Details of Garden Troopers here

The programme started off with designing of name tags & an ice-breaker game.

AJ really put his heart & soul into designing his name tag.

Ice-breaker game.  Can you guess what game were we playing?

After that we proceeded to World of Plants for our 1st activity - 'It's All in the Name', where the children find out the scientific names of plant in Latin.

We then proceeded back to the room for activity 2 - 'Grow and Multiply', where the children were introduced plant propagation by stem cutting.  The children were pretty excited at this stage because it was a hands-on activity.  Everyone had a chance to transfer the soil to a small pot, cut the stem of the plant, plant the stem with its roots into the soil & water the plant.  In the process of it, the children not only learnt that stem cutting is 1 of the few ways that plants can multiply, they also got to learn the types of plants suitable for stem cutting.

Cindy, the trainer, demonstrated the steps of doing stem-cutting

At the end of the session, the children were allowed to bring back the pots of plant they have helped multiply.

Are you in the midst of planning school holiday programmes for your child?  If your child is between aged 9 to 12, this is 1 programme which you could consider.  In this 2-day adventure as a Junior Horticulturist, your child will get to experience exclusive 'behind-the-scenes' tours & hands-on activities.  Kindly click on this link to register, & the programme outline is in this link.

I guess my fingers weren't that black too.  The pot of plant we brought back is still alive after 3 weeks!  Yay!