SFLS “National Week” School Club Exhibition

School Name: Shanghai Foreign Language School Affiliated to SISU

Group Name: SFLS Roots & Shoots

Event Date:  2015-04-10

Report Submitter: Sijia Liu

Participant Number: 170

Time: 2015/04/10 08:00-10:30

Location: Shanghai Foreign Language School Campus

In March we started planning this annual school club exhibition, where we chose “White Cup Painting”, “Identifying Leaves” and the “Million Tree Project” as our main events for the display.

For the “White Cup Painting” participants were offered three painting options: plants, animals or city and are requested to illustrate the theme on a used white cup, aiming to reduce and reuse waste. In “Identifying Leaves”, leaves from different trees were provided and the participants had to identify the selected leaves. As for the “Million Tree Project”, it’s an annual event and ,this time, we set the goal of funding enough money for 50 trees.

From mid-March to early April, 3 club members were selected as leaders of the preparation teams for the 3 main events, with each team having 6 to 7 members. Two club members were in charge of the entire Roots & Shoots exhibition and reported to the club head directly. An important reminder was that much of the equipment were handmade, for instance, a turntable used in “Identifying the Leaves” was build out of a camera stand and wheel surf. Therefore, the only cost necessary was the purchase of rewards for the participants.

Many of our peers came to our exhibition that day, much of it due to the “White Cup Painting” and its uniqueness. Although the final project wasn’t perfect, it was interesting to see different artistic styles from people on the cups. Also, it played the role as a great start of our upcoming event “White Cup Contest”.

“Identifying the Leaves” was more challenging comparing with the two others. Although all the leaves we used were common on campus, most students still found it difficult to recognize most of them. However, there was still a few that got them all right and got to leave with a Roots & Shoots pin as reward.

The most unexpected was the enthusiasm people had toward “Million Tree Project”, since not only students but also a lot of teachers, including our Spanish teacher from Mexico and a teacher from Germany, donated to the project. As a result, we were able to raise 2300 RMB, equivalent to 92 trees to be planted in Inner Mongolia. Some students commented under our WeChat account saying “Really looking forward to an ‘SFLS Forest’!”, which moved many of us and made us more determined in protecting the environment and encouraging people to do the same.

During the two-and-half-hour exhibition, an estimated number of 150 students participated in our activities. In the final polls of the Student Government, SFLS Roots & Shoots Club ranked top 3 among the 34 clubs in the school and was voted “Best Interactive Club”. Excited about the final result, our club members also learned a lot from the exhibition, which included the communicative skills and felt like we had even more responsibility to motivate others to live in a balance with our nature.

Though pretty successful was this exhibition, there was still something left that can be improved. For example, some club members were too shy to talk to students approaching our booth, while some questions that came from the participants were not considered fully during preparation, etc. To fix these problems in the future, a more thorough plan and a good training system are required in order to get students better prepared and strengthen the communication between leaders and their teammates to help them open up.

After the mid-term exam we will hold our major event this semester in cooperation with a dozen of other schools, which is “White Cup Contest” as mentioned above. We will use videos and social media to introduce our event, while offline activities will also be held regularly. We hope to use our experience from the big events such as this school club exhibition in order to make our upcoming events better than what we can do now.

If you are interested in this event please contact:meredithliu98@gmail.com