'Fire!'

Coco didn't do very well for her Chinese Paper One (composition) yesterday.

She didn't complete it in fact. She said that the classroom clock was down and she didn't have a watch with her. As a result, she left the last paragraph undone.

I was quite disappointed, but there was nothing I could do.

Today, I had her practise her English composition. I gave her a three-picture fire scenario and gave a time allowance of 50 minutes.

To my pleasant surprise, I thought she wrote very well for a 10-year-old.

Her work:

"Sniff, sniff!" "What's that smell?" I thought as I walked towards the block of flats I lived in. It was quite late at night and I had just returned home, tired out, after a whole day spent at the zoo as a school excursion. The moon was shining so brightly, that I looked up to admire it. Suddenly, I noticed, beside the moon, there was a huge billow of black smoke! "How strange ..." I thought, I looked at the black smoke closely and relised that the smoke was coming from Mother Earth! With a dawning horror, I knew in a flash, what was happening. Black smoke could only mean one thing: Fire! And it was nearby too! I decided to go there and see how big the fire was ... ...

As I came in to sight of the fire, I stopped in my tracks. A shophouse was burning up! The place was engulfed in smoke! It was Uncle Lin's shophouse that was burning up! I had a crush on Bethany, Courtny and Faith's sister Hope for the longest time I could remember! I hope the Lin family were out. Suddenly I remembered to call the fire brigard. I whipped out my cell phone and called the fire brigard ... ...

Suddenly, I heard a distant scream, familiar to my ears. It was Hope's voice. I heard a "Help!". It was Hope calling for help! Muttering a fast prayer under my breath, I turned to look at the shophouse. Hope was trapped on the upper level of the shophouse! I felt my jaw fall open. Hope! I whispered a prayer that before the fire got to her, the fire brigard would come ... ...

"Ee-aw, ee-aw!" the fire brigard's sirens could be heard. The firemen extinguished the burning inferno while the captain had went to the window which Hope was at just now and carried her down. I was releved that Hope was not hurt. Hope thanked me for calling the fire brigard and I started dating Hope. It turned out that Hope's mother had forgotten to turn off the stove and thus caused a fire. Hope learned never to trust her mother with anything flammable and I learned that the old saying of if you do a good deed, you will be rewarded is true!

(red font - mistakes; blue font - my addition)

I like how the writing made me laugh out loud. I haven't been tickled by a piece of writing for too long. I thought it cute to add the 'crush' bit and how 'I' ended up dating Hope for the good deed I did, and Hope's learning never to trust her mother with something flammable again.

I am almost proud that Coco is developing her style of writing. The pictures came in a model composition assessment book, but she did not even bother to check out the 'pompous' - as some people call it - or bombastic vocabulary used in the model compositions.

I do notice that she has a preference for '... ...' . In fact, all her first three paragraphs end with the same punctuation mark.

Having been a Paper One marker at the all-important PSLE exam, I had a nasty surprise at how high a standard many children's writings were. I remember feeling totally uneasy and worried about my school kids' composition results at PSLE as I marked those fantastic scripts. Compared to these scripts, my school kids are at Primary 2 or 3 standard of writing. They won't be able to match that kinda standard for another ten years.

The marking experience made me do a reality check and decide to send her for enrichment lessons on her supposedly-already-good English. I guess it was a wise decision after all. It has so far piqued her desire to be better in the language to match up to the centre's standard.

And for the writing that I see now, boy am I glad to say that for once in my life, I think I've made a right decision. Of course, she might have developed her writing ability on her own, but it doesn't matter to me. I needed her to know that for something that's already great, it still has room for improvement.

(Talking about 'room for improvement', I better start preparing student's remarks for the year-end result slips!)