Rain Forest Makers

Move over Gardening 101; these students are growing their own rainforest.

STEVE EARLY and MARTHA BEGAN are science teachers at the Singapore American School. Expat Living’s Monica Pitrelli spoke to them both about the school’s on-campus “living laboratory” rainforest.

How did the idea to create a rainforest begin?

Steve: When my wife and I first came to Singapore in 1992, SAS had three separate campuses – in Ulu Pandan, on King’s Road and at Baytree Sports Complex. The school was bursting at the seams with students and demand! When our current location in the Woodlands was offered for sale, we were all like, “Where is the Woodlands?”

Before the school was built, I brought my seventh-grade students to see the land. It was a big, open vacant lot with a stream and long grass with vacant HDB buildings nearby. It was like a ghost town. We decided to write an environmental impact statement to see how a big, new school would affect the neighbourhood from environmental, societal and cultural standpoints. The project took an entire year. We did field trips, visited hawker centres, interviewed people and explored the neighbourhood. There was a standing forest on the land, and the natural history group did bird surveys and identified plants. We found a bunch of fruit trees – including durian, star fruit and jackfruit – and we concluded the area was probably an abandoned fruit plantation. The kids wrote a letter to the school’s architects asking them to keep the fores t so we could make it an outdoor classroom.

Did SAS start using the rainforest right away?