Reviewing The PSLE 2024 Chinese Paper 1 Composition Question

Every year after the PSLE, there will always be some discussion amongst students and parents about the current year’s papers. While it is not helpful for Primary 6 students who have already completed the exams, current P4 and P5 students in PSLE Chinese Tuition may find it useful to know the trends and standard of the PSLE before their turn comes to take the papers.

One component of the 2024 PSLE that has spurred some discussion in parents forums is the Chinese Paper 1 – specifically, the picture-stimulus composition question.

Curious to know what the topic was and how to tackle it? Let’s look through it together!

Question

The pictures depict a few students planning for a Teacher’s Day performance item. During the preparation for the performance, one student fell and injured himself.

Challenges

Some students shared that they were unsure about the focus or theme of the story. For example, some students described the story as ‘A Memorable Teacher’s Day’, while others tied the story to morals like ‘Safety First’, ‘Perseverance’, or ‘Teamwork’.

A few students were also unsure about how to deal with the number of characters shown in the pictures. As there are at least 4 students shown, students were not sure if they needed to mention all of them with distinct characters, or just group them as ‘Xiao Ming’s Friends’.

Our tutor’s review

There are a few ways to angle this story, and students are unlikely to be marked as off-topic as long as the story centres on the main events in the pictures (e.g. the performance item, Teacher’s Day, injury). However, students should steer clear of trying to include too many themes or change the story angle in the middle of the composition.

What is more important is ensuring that the incident is described in a way that leads logically to the moral of the story, instead of adding a moral at the end randomly. For example:

• If you want to conclude with ‘Safety First’, ensure that the body of the composition mentions how the student(s) were careless in observing safety measures, which led to the injury of the student. You could also emphasise the consequences of failing to prioritise safety: injury that affect the whole team and performance.
• If you want to conclude with ‘Teamwork’, ensure that your composition mentions the behaviour and responses of the other students, and how they worked together despite their classmate’s injury to still make Teacher’s Day special for their teacher.

Get more PSLE support at Future Academy

These few years are marked by numerous changes to PSLE and the primary school curriculum in Singapore, including changes to the gifted and high-ability programmes. It is likely that we will continue to see some shifting trends and ‘unusual sightings’ in the upcoming PSLE papers. Students will no longer be able to score well with just memorisation and being ‘book-smart’, but will need to exercise more skills like applying knowledge, lateral thinking, and inference.

As one of Singapore’s leading tuition centres, we pride ourselves on being at the forefront of education, keeping up-to-date on exam trends and education reforms in Singapore. With a focus on imparting thinking skills and exam techniques, our PSLE Tuition classes provide a holistic and enjoyable learning experience for our students!