The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of the genre-based approach on ESL children’s writing both at school and at home. Among genre writing, narrative writing was chosen for more detailed text analysis based on systemic functional grammar (SFG). Apart from their increasing control of schematic structure and other linguistic features, the ESL children expanded their range of process types so remarkably that various experiential meanings were constructed in each child’s narrative writing style. This study found that the genre-based approach helped ESL children to take their first steps into the world of narrative writing by explicitly supporting its schematic structure and other elements. The ESL children seemed to develop their own styles of narrating using the same genre-based approach at school, which proves a paradoxical truth in the sense that the genre critics often point out the lack of individual creativity due to the ‘stifled’ genre pedagogy. Creativity, particularly in the case of the two ESL children, came after jumping on the ‘springboard,’ which is a proper support system in their genre writing.