LA short story ( final draft )

“ Mom, do I have to...” I murmured. “ Come on, John, its your first day of school overseas! Shouldn't you be excited?” My mother exclaimed.

“ But...but...”

“ No buts, now go.”

I had no choice but to listen to my mother, I walked towards the gate and suddenly, someone banged into me, without apologising, he shot off. I caught a glimpse of his face as he banged into me. I turned around and said, “ You see? The people here are so aggressive!” My mother looked at me, “ Its ok, I am sure school here is going to work out fine.” “ I doubt it will.” I thought to myself as I headed off towards the school again, taking notice of my surroundings just to make sure that there was not going to be another person coming at me.

Today was the first day of my school at Hwa Fu Institution. I was from New York, and had to migrate all the way to Singapore due to my mother who recently lost her job and wants to come here to start a new beginning. My friends back in New York had warned me about this place, saying that the people here are very hostile, and I should be very cautious not to get into trouble. My friends also stated that the people here said very strange languages which sound like English.

As I was walking towards the classrooms, I could hear some people behind whispering to each other and giggling. “ Hey look at that ang moh, he look so funny, hahaha.” One of them whispered. “ I just got here and now I already got a nickname? How worse can this place be!” I thought to myself frantically. When I found my class, I was about to step inside when a huge figure stood in front of me. I froze on the spot, slowly lifted my head and saw a tall and buff boy grinning at me. I looked at his face closely as I thought that it looked quite familiar, then it struck me, it was the boy who banged into me earlier!

I thought of countless things that he would do next at that time. Would he grab me and say that I would have to give him my pocket money forever? Or would he make me turn around and give me a wedgie? I was too scared at that moment to run for my life, I thought to myself, “ OK, this is it.” “ Hey, sorry about earlier ah, was rushing to tell teacher something. My name Randy, whats yours?” My eyes popped open as I was wondering why he did not do all the things that I had thought about. When I recovered from the shock, I replied “ My name is John, nice to meet you.”

Randy let me sit beside him in class and we started to talk about ourselves. I asked him about the language that he was speaking. He did not quite understand what I was talking about and I asked him why he included the words “ lah, leh, ah.” into his sentence. He then understood what I meant and explained to me that it is called singlish. “ Aiya I dont know why I always say it , I think its because I learnt it from my parents.” he explained. “ Ring...ring...” the school bell rang as our teacher came into the class.

During recess, me and Randy rushed to the canteen. When I reached into my pocket to take out my pocket money to pay for he food, I realised that I had forgotten to take my pocket money from my mother. Randy noticed that something was wrong and asked me what happened. “ Erm...I dont have any pocket money.” I replied, feeling embarrassed. “ Oh its ok, I have some spare pocket money here, you can return me the money tomorrow.” Randy said without any hesitation. “ Wow, I never knew that Singaporeans were so kind and helpful.” I thought to myself.

Looks like I was wrong about Singaporeans being aggressive and hostile. It turned out that Singaporeans were actually very kind and helpful! I also found out that the language that Singaporeans were saying was actually English, just that there is a little twist in it. Mom was right about everything turning out to be fine. I am starting to think that being in Singapore is better than being in New York!

Second comic strip with reflections

This second comic strip that I made is about acceptance. It talks about a boy who is different from others and is bullied. Then a boy decides to accept him as a friend and go up to talk to him. I had lots of fun creating this comic strip. I was hoping to find a time to create it and finally got a chance to. During the process of making this comic strip, I had some difficulties such as finding the right character to successfully convey the theme of this comic strip. I thought of this theme as I already had an example of the boy who gets bullied in this story in my class. He makes people become annoyed easily which is the reason why my classmates dislike him. I hope that he changes his ways so that my class can be more bonded together. I feel that making comic strips is a fun thing to do as it helps to burn time and helps to improve my creativity.

Im afraid...

I am afraid of being alone in a dark and small room. It makes me go crazy as I am claustrophobic. I never liked to sleep in a room to myself, so I always sleep in the same room as my brothers. Another thing that I am afraid of is heights, whenever I looked at the bottom from a very high place, my legs would turn into jelly. I am faced with this problem most in my cca, gymnastics. My cca requires me to do lots of crazy stuff that people would not normal do. Whenever I meet this problem, I would try to solve it by coming up with a solution to it. But if I cant think of anything, I would have no choice but to force myself to do it.

Im tired

I am tired of having to wake up early in the morning at 6 15 a.m every weekday just to go to school early. I am tired of having to force myself out of my beauty sleep and wake up. I am tired of being the first person in my family to wake up.I am really tired of having to eat the same old and plain porridge every morning. I am VERY tired of having to go to school so early in the morning. Oh how I hope someone could help me get out of this misery.

reflections on my IS test on thursday

I just had my IS( Infocomm Studies) test yesterday. Before the test started, Mr Yong, our IS teacher, gave us a chance to revise what we had learnt during the last 4 lessons that we had. I was lucky as I could not really understand what some parts were about and could ask Mr Yong about it. Mr Yong also gave us some "clues" to what the questions would be about. Then, we were ask to go to take the test online. We were given 20 minutes to complete the test which consisted of 15 questions. Despite the revision, the questions were very challenging and hard to answer. We got our results straight away after we answered all the questions and I got a 10 out of 15. I was not so happy with my test results as I wanted to get a A1 so that it could pull up my term MSG, but I decided to take it as there were other people got lower marks than me.

Reflections on my first RS(research studies) of the year

Today we had our first RS of the year. It happened after school at LT4. We were supposed to be there by 2.15p.m. However, due us taking so long to settle down, we ended up starting at about 2.25p.m. The first category that the teachers talked to us about was cat 1, experimental research. The teachers talked to us about the what we should come up with in our project and what we should not come up with. I was doing cat 11 so I did not pay much attention to what the teacher said. Next was cat 9,math. The teacher showed us some of the works that made it to the finals last year. The projects seemed very hard to comprehend as some of the things that the students came up with were not taught during class. Finally it was chinese, I could not read what was on the screen as I was seating at the back of the lecture theater. We finished at about 3.40p.m and everyone rushed of to do their respective activities.

My neighbourhood

I live in a condominium, it has a garden. The garden is filled with beautiful flowers with a sweet smell. Beside the garden is the swimming pool. Its shape is irregular and many people from my condo come down and swim in it. There is a baby pool next to the swimming pool. My little brother likes to go there and swim. There is a slide next to the baby pool. My condo also has a function room, people can play table-tennis there or organize events such as parties. Above the function room is the gym. My brothers and I usually go there to work out during the school holidays to keep us in shape. Another floor above the gym is the barbecue pit, my parents do not use it for barbecue. Instead, we have our own barbecue in our house. My home is at the first floor, this is not a bad thing as every house that is on the first floor gets a mini garden. The garden in my house is planted with different kinds of plants such as aloe vera.

A vivid childhood memory

There was once when I was 5 years old and my parents decided to bring me to a gymnastics club at Raffles institution. The coaches there were very strict and would either scold or punish me if I talked while we were training. The punishment was very harsh and tiring. I was afraid of him punishing me so I kept my mouth shut the whole time and did not dare to talk. This caused me to learn to be more obedient and less mischievous. It also taught me to keep quite during class and listen to the teacher.

reflection on BBQ

Yesterday my family had a barbecue and my parents invited a lot of people to come to our house to eat. My relatives were also invited. There was a very wide spread on the table before the barbecue started. My parents ask me and my brothers to started the barbecue. When we first started the grill, we put our favourite food first. After awhile, when we flipped the food around, we realised that most of the food was actually charred! We did not stop trying and before long, we could get the hang of it. However, the grill suddenly caught fire because of our stingray which had a flammable sauce in it. we ended up having to put water on the fire to put it out. The barbecue ended after everyone had their fill and went home.

LA short story (Draft 2)

Going to Singapore

“ John, have you finished packing your luggage?” My noisy mother questioned. “ Yes…yes I have finished mom.” I replied feeling annoyed. We were going to migrate from our home state, New York, to a country in Asia called Singapore. I was reluctant to go to Singapore at first as I was going to go to a strange environment and there was no one that I knew plus my friends said that Singapore was a very scary place and the folks over there speak a strange language called “Singlish ”, but my mother insisted as she had recently lost her job and wants to go to Singapore to start over, so I agreed to go. Before long, we were on board a plane that was heading towards Singapore.

“ We are arriving at Changi international airport soon, we hope that you have a wonderful time here, good bye.” The flight attendant said to us. I looked out of the window pane and saw an eerie pitch black airport and thought “ Oh no.” We checked in to a hotel nearby to stay temporarily until we could find a suitable house. I could barely sleep that night as my mind was filled with visions of what unfortunate things would happen to me in school.

“Ring…ing…ing” my noisy and annoying alarm clock rang. I opened my panda looking eyes and stared at the ceiling,” Looks like the first day of hell has begun.” I thought. I lazily strolled out of my room to the kitchen where I saw my mother preparing breakfast for me. I sat down on my chair and stared at my food, I had no appetite. So I picked up my utensils and started to fiddle around with them. “My mother saw what was happening and consoled me, “Don’t feel sad, school’s going to be fun! There certainly would be at least one person that would be willing to be your friend.” I look at her and gave her a blank smile. After breakfast, I changed into my school uniform went off with my mother to school.

“Hey John, listen, your new school is called Garden institution, I heard that it is pretty good and it has produced many scholars.” My mother explained to me while we were getting into the taxi which my mother flagged down. “Even though a school can produce a lot of scholars that does not mean that there would be no bullies.” I thought. The journey from the hotel to school flew by quickly, before I knew, I had already arrived at my school.” Remember, your class is 1S2.” My mother explained to me before I got out of the taxi. I nodded and went out of the taxi towards the school.

It looked very old and torn down, like the kind of place bullies would go to. I looked around and saw many unfamiliar faces all rushing past me. I was shy of asking anyone for directions, so I decided to go and walk around to find my class. After minutes of walking around the maze-like school, I finally saw “1S2”, my classroom. My heart was racing around in my body, I felt like there were butterflies in my stomach flapping around. My body was shaking non-stop.

As I finally decided to take the first step into the class room, I suddenly felt a strong but warm hand reach out and pat on my shoulder, I nervously turned around. “ Hi, are you our new classmate from New York? Welcome! My name is Randy and I am the class chairman, let me introduce you to our classmates.” I felt surprised at what had just happened. Could I be wrong about these Singaporeans all this while? Randy brought me inside the class and started introducing me to our classmates,” This is…and this is…and this is…”

I felt a sense of relief right after we finished the introduction. Everyone here is so kind and caring! I could not believe I was scared of coming to this kind of place. At the end of the day, everyone in the class became my friends.

A scene from my favourite movie

My favourite movie is "Gulliver's Travels". I like the scene where Gulliver( Jack Black) is fighting a robot as big as him and is getting a wedgie. I think that this scene is very funny as Gulliver initially thought that he was the biggest thing but the man proved him wrong by making a huge robot and giving him a wedgie.