A Story on a School Trip: Model Answer for Class 9 and 10 with Marking Notes
Quick answer: An original 180-word exam story about a school trip to Hampi, with notes on how it earns content, organisation and expression marks and three other ways to take the topic.
A school trip story earns marks when one thing happens on the trip that could not have happened at school: a quiet classmate is revealed, a plan fails and someone unexpected fixes it, a place changes how the narrator sees a person. The itinerary is not the story. Pick one incident, give it a turning point, and let the destination do a little work in the background. The model below is about 180 words and follows a Class 9 to the ruins at Hampi.
The commonest weak version is a diary: we left at six, we saw this, we ate that, we came home tired. Examiners cannot mark a diary for content because nothing in it turns.
The task
Typical wording: 'Write a story in 150 to 200 words about a school trip you will never forget.' Or an outline: 'a trip to a historic place ... the guide ... a problem ... an unlikely helper ... what the class learnt.' Decide the incident first, then choose the place that suits it.
Model answer
The Boy at the Back. Class 9C went to Hampi in November, forty of us in a bus that left Bengaluru at five in the morning. Our guide met us at the Virupaksha temple, a cheerful man with a flag on a stick, and within an hour he had lost his voice completely. He stood in front of the stone chariot opening and closing his mouth like a fish.
Miss Pereira looked at the ruins, then at forty restless students, then at the guidebook she had not read. That was when Sujay put his hand up. Sujay sat at the back and said perhaps ten words a week.
He knew everything. He knew which king had built the chariot and why the wheels had once turned. He knew the musical pillars and made us stand still to hear them. He walked us through the elephant stables telling us where each animal had stood, and forty people who had never listened to him followed him for four hours.
On the bus home he sat at the back again. But three people sat with him, and one of them was me.
Why it earns marks
Against the three heads:
Three other ways to take the same topic
Each picks one incident. Any would also suit Writory's monthly short story contest, open from age 13, which scores every story out of 100.
What writers can take from this
- One incident, not an itinerary.
- Let the place appear in three real details and then step back.
- Give the incident a gap that an unlikely person fills.
- Show the change in where people sit or stand, not in what they say.
- Keep the teacher human: one moment of not knowing is enough.
- Save the narrator's own change for the last sentence.
Try it yourself
Write a 180-word school trip story in which the narrator learns something about a teacher, not a classmate, and the teacher never finds out the narrator noticed.
Questions
How long should a school trip story be?
Follow the paper: 100 to 120 words for CBSE Class 9, 150 to 200 for most school exams, 300 to 350 for ICSE. Cut the third paragraph to two sentences to reach 120.
Can I write a school trip story in the first person?
Yes, and 'we' is a natural voice for a class trip. Move to 'I' only at the moment the narrator's own view changes, as the model does in the last line.
Does a school trip story need a moral?
Only if the question asks. 'Never judge the quiet ones' would fit the model, but the three people at the back of the bus already carry it.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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