My friend asked me if I could spot this year’s PSLE Composition topic, which set my heart and mind racing. Thus, this late-night musing.

Things have certainly changed since the last time I taught primary school from 2019-2021. Then, I not only methodically compiled a list of prelim compo topics, but also, categorised them into positives (https://diaperfinancingfund.blogspot.com/2025/05/composition-outlines.html?m=1) and negatives. I remember forcing my P4s to find out the meaning of these topics and putting my best foot forward to help them understand “dilemma”.

However, if I were to do this now, I would reveal that I’m out of touch with exam trends. Somewhere along the line, the compo topics that came out were non-commital in their neutrality. From 2020 to 2022: Something that was Lost, A Promise, and A Long Wait. You can put either a positive or negative spin on the title, depending on how you want the story to flow.

In 2023, the stakes got higher during the exam because our young minds had to unpack the inherent premise that comes with the question. With a “A Change for the Better”, students had to first account for the initial dismal state of events, then describe the change, and finally explain how it led to an improvement. Not easy for 12-year-olds to decode under exam pressure.

This trend continued with last year’s topic: Trying Something New. Honestly, if I were writing a compo on this topic, I might not have made it explicitly clear that I was undertaking this something for the FIRST TIME. So tricky!

Now that I need to gear my P5s up for next year, I immediately thought of coming up with something to the effect of “A Blessing in Disguise”. It would entail them describing something bad that has occurred and then “twisting” it around to explain why some good has come out of it. Should be an intriguing topic for them to tackle, even if it’s unlikely to be tested for PSLE. Disguise is a vocabulary word, so I doubt the exam board will be so merciless to test something that requires more than rudimentary English skills.

Which is a long and convoluted way of saying that I am still thinking of easy peasy exam topics that come with deadly, easy-to-neglect inherent premises.