Koala Kids Enrichment Center

Thirty-four children and four teachers from Koala Kids Enrichment Center had an exciting day at the Friends' Outreach premises last Friday, the 22nd of July.

The cute kids came in a big bus with Koala Kids' Business Director, Mr Saw Leng Syn,at 9.00am and were welcomed by the committee and volunteers of the Friends of the Penang Botanic Garden Society. 

The children, all below 7 years of age, were sweet and extremely well-behaved. Thanks to their teachers, they all lined up quietly before separating into two groups to participate in two educational activities - Seed Safari and Worm Hotel. 

Those children going on the Seed Safari, conducted by Friends' Vice-President Dr. Liew Kon Wui, were given vests to wear for identification purposes before setting off on a little trek to look at trees, plants and their seeds.

They were taught about how different kinds of plants produced different kinds of seeds and shown a variety of seeds. The children were given little specimen collection bottles of their own so that they could collect any of the different plant parts, flowers or seeds that caught their eye during their safari.

Their little adventure concluded with a craft session at Outreach as they were taught how to make collages from seeds and the various leaves and flowers they had collected during their walkabout. 

The children had a fun time gumming various kinds of seeds to make pictures of flowers, butterflies, snakes, and leaves. The more creative ones added small leaves and flowers from their specimen bottles.

The other group learnt all about worms. They were taught about how to find worms, what worms liked to eat, where they lived and the different parts of a worm.

The children also learnt how useful worms were to the environment before being given the opportunity to handle some worms of their own. 

The adorable little children handled their worms quite fearlessly and had a fun time helping to build a worm hotel step by step. In fact, some of the children who had been a little fearful of worms at the beginning, ended up asking for extra worms to put into their little worm hotels.

In the process, they learnt about creating an ecologically viable environment for their worms to survive. 

After a short break, the two groups switched places and enjoyed their second round of activities for the morning. Their fun nature awareness programme ended at 1pm when the bus came for them.

20th Anniversary Celebrations

We celebrated our 20th Anniversary on the 16th of July this year, with a simple tree-planting ceremony at the Botanic Gardens.

On hand to do the honours were Dato' Seri Chia Kwang Chye, a pioneer member and one of the first presidents of the Society, the Pengarah of the Jabatan Taman Botani, En. Ahmad Azwa Shah bin Ahmad, our incumbent President, Tengku Idaura bte Tengku Ibrahim, our current Vice-President, Dr. Liew Kon Wui, and pioneer members Dato' Dr. Leong Yueh Kwong (his membership number is Number 1!) as well as Mr. Kanda Kumar from the Malaysia Nature Society, who is also a pioneer of our society.

Pioneer members of the society were all invited and there was a good turn out of current, past and pioneeer members for the event, which began with a tram and van ride from the Jabatan Taman Botani office complex courtesy of the Pengarah. At the tree-planting venues, the members were joined by all the staff of the JTB who had been involved in the event for a commemorative group photograph.

After the ceremony, everybody adjourned to the Seminar Room at the Jabatan Taman Botani office complex for refreshments and to catch up on fond memories. Dato' Dr. Leong and Tengku Idaura (herself a pioneer member) recalled the early struggles and the triumphs of the society during the preceding decades. Dr. Liew gave a brief presentation about sustainable biodiversity in Penang and the society's efforts to maintain it. A slideshow with photographs of the many events, activities and programmes in which the society participated or hosted over the last twenty years concluded the presentations for the day.

Members and other attendees were presented with souvenir bags generously sponsored by the Jabatan Taman Botani and commemorative tea cloths handprinted with local plants by the society's art and crafts group before refreshments, which included a giant-sized vegetarian fruit cake baked and donated by Datin Prabawathy Rajah, a long-standing and highly respected member of the society.

The event concluded at 12 noon, everyone having enjoyed the lovely food and wonderful memories recalled by the day's events.

A Momento for Jenny Choo

Jenny Choo was presented with a lovely copy of Heritage Trees Of Penang by our president YM Tengku Idaura, for her years of dedicated service to the Society and our Garden Shop recently. 

It was a brief and simple presentation only as Jenny and the other ladies of the Craft Group were busy printing T-shirts and tea towels for our forthcoming 20th Anniversary celebrations.

A Serai Affair

Our new committee member in charge of activities for 2016 is Jenny Cheah. We are looking to enliven our activities programme for the latter half of 2016, with new and different activities for both members as well as non-members of the public.

Our new programme was kicked off with a members-only tea entitled "A Serai Affair" at the Outreach office premises on the first of June. 

Since lemongrass or serai is normally regarded as a curry ingredient, the theme of our tea-party was to use  serai creatively, making puddings, kuih, jelly and other dessert items with it. The tea party also served as a try-out for Jenny and the other Activities members to develop it into an activity that can be offered to the public in general.

Our president, Tengku Idaura, Jenny and the volunteer members outdid themselves preparing a variety of snacks using serai as the main ingredient. Tengku Idaura's serai-based serunding was a real hit. We tried eating it with bread, roti jala and rice and it was great every time! We even made two different kinds of lemongrass drinks - a warm, aromatic serai tea that was equally good cold and a refreshing iced and diced lemongrass jelly beverage. Comments, suggestions and critiques were most welcome and we received a lot of useful feedback on how to make out puddings tastier, as well as other desserts we could try making in future. 

Of course, we shall be starting a collection of more serai recipes after this. And the more serai desserts we can come up with the merrier! We all seem to have a sweet tooth for lemony cakes, puddings and jellies.

  

A Serai Affair was certainly a fun morning for everyone who turned up, with Miss Tan Chia Wen making beautifully fragrant pandan roses for everyone. In fact, all the people who turned up were so generous with their food contributions to the event that those who wanted them could take little bags of extra food home!

With the experience gained from A Serai Affair, we can now start looking at how to make this tea-party activity into part of a larger programme, like combining it with either a similar cookery activity involving another local herb or fruit or handicraft demonstrations and lessons using local plants, origami with coconut leaves, for example.

*For our friends from other countries, here's a short glossary of the Malaysian food mentioned in this post.

kuih - Malay word for cakes, puddings and deserts.

serunding - a dry-fried mixture of coconut, aromatic herbs and either finely pounded dried meat, fish or prawns. 

roti jala - lacy Indian crepes made by drizzling a local crepe mixture on a flat, hot pan.