Field Trip

Backgrounds

Our A-level centre organized an extra-curriculum to let all its A-level students live in a countryside for three days. This activity aimed at strengthening our teamwork spirit and experiencing lives as volunteers, so our countryside life included not only busy work, but also relaxing entertainment.

Busy work

We did a lot of meaningful activities, such as growing scindapsus aureus, making dumplings, removing weeds, using grass to make shoes and cutting branches.

Obviously, all of them above required teamwork, but the majority of them just needed us to work as a team. Each student did the same work in these activities. In other words, everyone didn’t need to specialize in a particular task and did their specific role.

Therefore, I will introduce another activity we did there–making a kind of Chinese traditional drink–soybean milk.

Making soybean milk

The step of making soybean milk is below:

1.Put soybeans and water in a stone mill.

2.Rotate the stone mill horizontally by holding a handle on it.

3.Collect the soybean milk by using a brush.

4.Put the soybean milk into the stone mill again. Then continues the steps 2 and 3 above.

Five or six students needed to work as a group to make the soybean milk. Each student had its own task. One student needed to put soybeans or soybean milk into the mill, one student needed to collect soybean milk, one student needed to wash the mill, other student needed to rotate the mill.

You can see that it’s impossible for us to make soybean milk unless each student does their own task well. I was interested in making soybean milk, (mainly because I loved drinking it)
so I chose the hardest work–rotating the mill.

And I was the leader of my group as well. With effective communications (and my strength to rotate the mill), our group made the soybean milk efficiently.

Here is a photo:

Entertainment

We had also watched a firework show. In addition, we had a talent show in a theatre. I think it couldn’t be seen as unforgettable experience, so I didn’t introduce them here.

My feelings–what I have learned from this field trip.

Generally speaking, l had learned the spirit of teamwork during those three days. We worked together, ate together, relaxed together and even slept together! We sometimes shared technique skills of doing busy work like making soybean milk in order to save effort, and we always cooperated with each other to work efficiently. We sometimes argued with each other since we had our own ideas, but we accepted each other gradually through the three-day-long work. As classmates, I believed that our common experience would boost us to care each other in the future.

In addition, we have also mastered skills that we could only learn in the countryside, like growing scindapsus aureus. We realized how difficult the farmers were and thus saved grains and protect plants.

In other words, a meaningful memory.