One of my F3-4 classes on a Sunday does a mix of science and literature as a way to work on a wide variety of writing skills. This week, they had to write a story about a science experiment that back-fires!

We read a story on the same theme, and then the students had to create a short story using any of the science we had covered in the term.

This piece, by Donnica Chick (F3), was actually better than the story that we read in class! It’s a gripping tale, which uses a great variety of sentence structures, and a lot of excellent writing techniques.

Scientists have always loved experimenting. It doesn’t even matter to them if it’s a living thing or not. They also make mistakes sometimes; the thing that’s experimented on might die. But they could never have known that this one mistake could change the world…

It was 2087; scientists had been experimenting on plants, trying to find a formula so that plants could grow quicker. They used a small plant, carefully adding a small drop of the chemical on the plant. In just a few moments, the plant started to grow, faster than any plant had before. They had finally done it, they thought. They cheered and smiled, excited and proud that they had figured it out. But the question now was, how could they make it stop?

The plant grew and grew, its stem splitting into a few more, until the whole lab was covered by the plant. Someone was finally smart enough to attempt to stop it. The scientist used a machine to crush it from the top. The plant stopped growing, or so they thought. When they tried cutting off some of the stems, it attacked them more furiously than ever. The plant used its ‘arms’ to grab onto the scientists, but they thought there was nothing to be afraid of. It wasn’t like the plant could eat them. Oh boy, were they wrong! What they didn’t know was that they didn’t just give the plant insanely fast growing speed, but also a brain. It had the ability to think and move, so it knew that it couldn’t eat them. That’s why it did something else. Bury them underground.

By doing so, it could absorb the nutrients and anything else from the soil. The plant also hid underground, and made itself tunnels to help it move around. Nobody knew about it, since the experiment had been done in secret. Nobody even thought about the possibility, even when people started disappearing. They all had something in common, a hole right underneath where they had last been standing. But the plant was smart enough; it hid and covered the tunnels every time it took someone, leaving the cops empty-handed and confused after every case. Will they ever be able to find and stop this plant?