One day I went to the park. I saw a boy. He fell down and he cried. Then I helped him. Then I gave him a plaster. Then his mother said thank you. Then I went home. I was very happy.
54 words · Content 5 · Language 5 · 10/20
A twenty-week course that takes a Primary 4 writer from “I went to the park and I was happy” to a story a marker wants to finish reading. One skill per week, three short sessions, and a full timed composition every fortnight.
Most P4 papers ask for a story of at least 120 words based on three pictures and a theme, written in about 50 minutes. Schools mark it out of 20: ten for Content, ten for Language. Everything in this course is aimed at one of those two columns — nothing else earns marks.
| Band | Content — 10 marks | Language — 10 marks |
|---|---|---|
| 9–10Excellent | All pictures used and connected. A clear problem that gets worse before it is solved. Details that only this story could have. | Sentences of different lengths and shapes. Precise verbs. Correct dialogue punctuation. Barely any errors. |
| 7–8Good | Story follows the pictures with a real problem and ending. Some good detail, some filler. | Mostly accurate. Some variety. A few careless slips in tense or spelling. |
| 5–6Fair | Retells the pictures rather than telling a story. Thin middle, rushed ending. | Simple sentences repeated. Errors that make the reader pause. |
| 1–4Weak | Misses pictures or drifts off the theme. Under the word count. | Frequent errors. No paragraphs. Hard to follow. |
Translate the rubric for her in one sentence: “Content is did something interesting happen and did you use all the pictures. Language is did you write it in sentences a Primary 4 marker enjoys reading.”
Pin the four bands above her desk. From Week 1 she should be able to point at the band her own paragraph sits in before anyone else marks it. Self-diagnosis is the skill that makes the other nineteen weeks stick.
Both of these answer the same picture set: a girl at a playground, a boy falling, a plaster being handed over. The left one is what a P4 child writes unprompted. The right one uses six techniques from this course, and is only sixty words longer.
One day I went to the park. I saw a boy. He fell down and he cried. Then I helped him. Then I gave him a plaster. Then his mother said thank you. Then I went home. I was very happy.
54 words · Content 5 · Language 5 · 10/20
The afternoon sun beat down on the playground as I raced towards the swings. Suddenly, a sharp cry pierced the air. A little boy in a red T-shirt lay sprawled on the gravel, his knee scraped raw. My heart lurched. I knelt beside him, dug the plaster out of my pocket and pressed it gently over the cut. “You are very brave,” I whispered. His sobbing softened into a wobbly smile. Walking home that evening, I felt a warm glow spread through my chest. Helping someone, I realised, costs nothing but means everything.
116 words · Content 9 · Language 9 · 18/20
The opening line places us somewhere before anything happens, and the problem arrives as a noise — not as “I saw a boy fall down.”
“My heart lurched” replaces “I was shocked.” “A warm glow spread through my chest” replaces “I was very happy.”
A single quoted line makes the scene live. The last sentence gives the marker the theme without saying “the moral of the story is.”
Four units of five weeks. Each unit ends with a full timed composition so progress is measured on the real task, not on drills. Do not skip ahead: Unit 2 is wasted on a child who cannot yet plan, and Unit 3 is wasted on a child whose sentences still collapse.
By the end of this unit she can look at any picture set and produce a five-box plan in under five minutes, then write it as four paragraphs.
Every composition has the same six bones: ordinary moment → something goes wrong → it gets worse → someone acts → it is fixed → how I felt about it. Learn the spine before anything else; it is the frame every later skill hangs on.
Children lose Content marks by describing pictures instead of connecting them. Teach the sweep: who, where, when, what is going wrong, who else can see it. Then the key question — what happened between picture 2 and picture 3 that we are not shown? That gap is where the marks live.
A plan is five short boxes, not sentences: Where / Who / Problem / What I did / Feeling at the end. Three or four words per box. Practise until the whole plan takes under five minutes on the clock — in the exam it must be automatic.
Four paragraphs, and the rule is simple enough to remember under pressure: a new paragraph when the time, the place, or the speaker changes. Paragraph 1 sets the scene, 2 brings the problem, 3 is the action, 4 is the ending and the feeling.
Four openers she can use anywhere: a sound (“CRASH!”), a line of speech, an action already in progress, or a setting with a mood. Ban “One day” and “It was a sunny day” permanently.
This is the Language column. By the end she writes sentences of varied length and shape, uses precise verbs, and punctuates speech correctly.
Six words are banned this week: went, said, looked, got, nice, very. Each has a shelf of better options — went becomes dashed, trudged, crept, stormed. This single change moves more Language marks than any amount of adjectives.
“A big dog” is worth nothing; “a shaggy brown mongrel” is worth a mark. The test for every adjective: does it tell the reader something they could not have guessed? If not, cut it. Two strong details beat six weak ones.
Three shapes to rotate: the short punch (“I froze.”), the joined sentence with because/but/so, and the starter that opens with -ing or an adverb (“Clutching my bag, I ran.”). Rule of thumb: never three sentences in a row of the same length.
The mechanics first — speech marks, capital letter inside, comma before the closing mark, new paragraph for each new speaker. Then the payoff: the speech tag does the emotional work. “whispered”, “snapped”, “pleaded”, not “said.” Two or three lines of speech per composition is plenty.
Cure the “then… then… then…” disease. Time words: moments later, before long, by the time we reached. Contrast words: however, although, even so. Cap it at one connector per paragraph — overloading them reads as badly as repeating “then.”
The unit that separates a 14 from an 18. She stops announcing feelings and starts making the reader feel them.
Build a personal bank: fear is a hammering heart, jelly knees, a dry throat; joy is a grin that will not go away, feet that barely touch the ground; anger is clenched fists, burning ears. She writes the bank herself — borrowed phrases never come back under exam pressure.
Most children write only what the eye sees. One line of sound or smell in the opening paragraph lifts a composition instantly. The quota is deliberately small: two non-visual details per composition, no more.
Similes and metaphors, with a hard limit of two per composition — and neither may be one she has heard before. “As white as snow” earns nothing in Singapore. “The rain fell like a handful of dropped marbles” earns the mark.
The single most common structural fault at P4: the exciting moment gets one sentence and the walk home gets four. The rule — the most important twenty seconds of the story get the most words. Break the action into beats and give each its own sentence.
An ending has two jobs: settle the problem, then land a feeling or a small realisation. Permanently banned: “Then I woke up and it was all a dream” and “The moral of the story is…”. The last line should sound like her, not like a proverb.
Everything she knows, delivered inside 50 minutes with a pen, under pressure, without help.
Fifty minutes, split 7 / 35 / 8: seven to read and plan, thirty-five to write, eight to check. Practise the split until she feels the halfway point without looking up. Aim for 150–200 words — comfortably past the 120 minimum, not so long that checking time disappears.
Eight minutes of checking is worth two or three marks, but only if it is systematic. She runs the six-point list (below) in order, one pass per point — not one vague read-through. Most children recover two spelling errors and one tense slip this way.
P4 papers circle the same ground: honesty, kindness, perseverance, safety, teamwork, responsibility, courage. For each, she prepares one real memory and one strong ending line. Not a memorised essay — a stocked cupboard she can cook from when the paper arrives.
Exam conditions: paper, pen, no phone, no questions, a clock she can see. Mark it strictly — strictly is kinder than generously here. Then she rewrites only the two weakest paragraphs, not the whole thing.
Final timed composition, then lay all five mocks on the table in order. She writes the review herself: three things that improved, one thing still to fix, and the marks in a line. That page becomes the first entry in next year’s notebook.
Roughly eighty minutes a week across three sittings, plus daily reading. Short and frequent beats one long Sunday session — writing stamina is built the way running stamina is.
Read the week’s skill together, look at two examples, and try it once on paper with help available.
25 minThe week’s drill, on her own. Short, mechanical, no story required. This is where the skill becomes automatic.
15 minThe week’s writing task. Odd weeks a paragraph, even weeks a full composition. Every second unit, on the clock.
40 minFifteen minutes of any book she likes, and one sentence she admires copied into the Golden Lines notebook.
15 min × 7Physical notebooks, not files on a laptop. Handwriting is what she does in the exam, and the act of copying a good sentence by hand is most of why it sticks.
One sentence a day, copied from whatever she is reading, with a two-word note on why it is good. By Week 20 she has around 140 sentences in her own handwriting — a style library assembled from books she chose.
Organised by feeling, not alphabetically: scared, excited, guilty, relieved, disappointed, proud. Each page collects verbs, body-language phrases and one full sentence. She adds; she never copies a printed list.
Three columns: what she wrote, the correction, the rule in her own words. Errors that appear three times get written on a card and taped inside the pencil case. Most children have fewer than eight recurring errors in total.
Every full composition, dated, marked, filed in order — never thrown away. Progress at this age is invisible week to week and obvious across ten weeks, and only the portfolio shows it.
Her last eight minutes in the exam, run in this order. One pass per point — a single vague read-through catches almost nothing.
These eight faults account for most of the gap between a 12 and an 18 at Primary 4. Name each one when it appears rather than writing “be more descriptive” in the margin.
Twelve skills, three states: not yet taught, taught but not automatic, automatic under exam pressure. Update it after every mock, not every week — a skill only counts once it survives the clock. The example below is a realistic picture at around Week 12.
The way a composition is handed back matters as much as the course. Four rules that keep a nine-year-old writing.
Pick the week’s skill and one recurring error. Everything else stays unmarked, even when you can see it. A page covered in red gets read once and never reread.
Not “good job” but “his sobbing softened into a wobbly smile — that is the best line on the page.” She will write ten more like it. Vague praise produces nothing.
Three questions do more than any correction: What happened just before this? How did your body feel? What would she have actually said? The answers are almost always the missing sentences.
Five sessions in twenty weeks are genuinely exam conditions — no questions, no spelling help, no stopping. Everything else can be as collaborative and noisy as you like.
The course works on paper first — that is deliberate, since the exam is on paper. But three parts of it are tedious by hand and would genuinely earn a screen. If you build the tool, build only these.
The five-box plan with a five-minute countdown, then a 7/35/8 exam timer with a quiet halfway chime. Live word count against the 120 minimum and the 150–200 target.
Her own bank, searchable by feeling, plus the six-point check as tappable items after the timer stops. The banned-word scan is a single regex pass over the draft.
Photograph the marked paper, store the two marks, draw the twelve-skill tracker. The chart across ten compositions is the part she will actually want to look at.
One caution. Do not build a screen that writes or auto-corrects her sentences. The whole value of Units 2 and 3 is that she generates the replacement word herself, slowly, from her own bank. A tool that suggests the better verb removes the exact effort that creates the skill.
The same single-file HTML approach you already use fits this well — no backend, all state in localStorage, and it runs on a tablet on the dining table.