PSLE COMPOSITION - A CRAB AT THE BEACH

I mentioned in the previous post that I visited the KiasuParents PSLE forum recently. It was a very fruitful trip as I saw there firsthand the sort of questions that parents and pupils were grappling with in the run-up to the PSLE.


Was it coincidence? Or the law of synchronicity? For this week's composition, I was going to go through this PSLE picture composition:

Then I saw this interesting discussion on KiasuParents, where tutor_ng mentioned that the highest mark he ever gave for a PSLE composition was 39. He went on to add that the composition was so impressive that he remembered the storyline up till the point of posting the comment.

So what was so impressive about the storyline? He said that it was written from a different perspective. The narrator of the storyline was an animal. This is exactly what I've been stressing about each time in the Picture Analysis videos -- if your storyline is different from what your peers are doing, it's easier for you to stand out from the crowd and score well for your content. Of course the caveat is that your storyline must also be logical. No point writing a story that is different from others', but it doesn't make sense. In that scenario, your composition will be considered out of point and you'll do worse than your peers who write the typical boring story.

From further clues here, one can tell that the picture he is talking about is the one with the elephant in the zoo drenching a man holding a camera. You should know which one I'm talking about. If you don't, you've not been studying hard enough. (If you really don't know which picture I'm referring to, please watch Video 1; I've embedded the picture in Video 1.)

For myself, the PSLE composition that scored 40/40 that I know about was also a picture composition. I can't remember which year it is from. If you have old PSLE booklets, you can try to check it out. It was a picture depicting a rainy day, two schoolchildren taking shelter under a bus-stop, and a car zooming past, splashing water at the children. Again, in this instance, the writer took an unusual perspective; the narrator was a raindrop witnessing the event!

So you see, scoring 40/40 for your composition in the PSLE is possible, albeit rare. I should add that needless to say, for these 'perfect' compositions, not only were the storylines unusual, the language used in the stories was also of the highest standard, with perhaps only a couple of minor careless mistakes.

Now I don't want everyone rushing out to write compositions with non-human narrators for the PSLE composition next week.

Why?

Because it is a risky venture. To do well in such stories, the writer must find the right 'voice'. That is, the narrator must come across as a credible non-human. This is challenging for many 12-year-olds. If the 'voice' is not done right, the exercise could end in disaster. So unless you're supremely confident, I'll say: Don't take the risk.


That said, this week's sample composition done by me is actually such a story -- the narrator is the crab in the story. You could just take it as a reference to how it is done. I'll also give three other sample stories, the better stories done by my students in class. The ones done by the students have a human narrator though. What they did was to use the inclusion of details and humour to make the storyline richer.


That was a long preamble. So without further ado, let us start on the first video.


 Video 1: Story Analysis





Sample Story

Video 2 - Describing Pain





Resources

Assignment - The sample story is in the worksheet itself.

Sample stories by students