General Reflction: Field Trip to MacRitchie and Science Lab experiences

As for this piece of reflective writing, I would mainly talk about our field trip to MacRitchie and also general Science Lab experiences of the year.

The MacRitchie trip that we had embarked on this year was a rather meaningful and extremely educational one. Firstly, we were briefed on some of the things that we would expect to experience on the trip the very moment we got there, and after this short briefing I also realised how interesting yet organised(which is a good thing also) it would be. We were given various experiment kits and a useful worksheet booklet that pretty much summarises the learning points that we were expected to understand when we complete the activity. After the whole activity in MacRitchie, I found out how different yet fun it was from my previous science field trips. An example would be during my years in primary school when they mention science field trips we would automatically expect it to be the Science Centre again and when we reach there we would observe and experience the same old attractions that it provides. What makes this MacRitchie field trip different from all those other field trips is that this time, we are actually supposed to get up on our feet and conduct various activities independently and get a rather personal and memorable experience at the end of the day, in other words, almost everyone has their own interpretion of the learning points that they had gained from this particular trip, which is the reason it is so special and interesting.

Moving on, now I would reflect on the various experiences we had gained from this year's Science Lab classes. At the beginning of the year, the very first science lab class, we learned something very important from our teacher, Ms Nada. We immediately realised that she was rather different than usual and unlike herself when she was teaching in normal class lesson. After some explanation, we finally understood that she was suddenly a lot more strict that usual because she feels that behaviour in the science lab is very crucial as it is an accident-prone place and can be dangerous at times if we do not practise self-control and discipline. From then on, we always try to be cautious when handling different lab equipments, and personally I feel that it is a good thing that Ms Nada had taught us these pointers on discipline in the lab right at the start of the year. After that for the following science lab classes, although I could not remember all of them precisely, nevertheless I learnt very valuable lessons and had gotten memorable experiences. Generally for the first two terms we got to experience mixing chemicals and observing how they change when mixed together. It was very interesting and educational as we got to learn the topic on chemicals more effectively when we experiment as see the results for ourselves rather then read it off from textbooks. In term 3, lab classes were even more interesting than ever because we got to experience manipulating ligh reflections by using various shapes and types of glasses and placing them in front of beams of light. It had inevitably helped us remember some of the concepts of light effects on concave/convex mirrors/glasses and such, despite having immense fun at the same time.

Altogether, I hope that we would have more opportunities to learn science through field trips and lab experiments instead of simply reading and memorizing facts with textbooks because it would be more meaningful and filled with much more fun and surprises.