The Floating City

Year 6 · Mystery

The Floating City is a free, NAPLAN-aligned mystery writing resource for Year 6 students. It includes a story starter, complication, tiered vocabulary and scaffolds mapped to the Australian Curriculum (AC9).

Year 6 AC9E6LE05 AC9E6LA05 AC9E6LA08 AC9E6LA09 AC9E6LA04 AC9E6LY06

Supports the Year 6 achievement standard (creating written texts).

Australian Curriculum content descriptions © ACARA. Writesy is not affiliated with or endorsed by ACARA.

I’ve heard the legends about the floating city before, but I never thought I’d see it for myself. My heart raced as I gazed up at the grand towers rising high above the clouds. Strange, glowing portals shimmered in the air, each one beckoning travellers to unknown lands. This was no ordinary city, it was something out of a dream. The air smelled of adventure and mystery, and I could feel the excitement tingling in my fingertips.

The complication

  • A portal flickers and then shuts while I am halfway through, leaving me stranded between the floating city and an unknown world.
  • A city guardian confronts me, demanding a password or proof of worthiness before I can explore further.
  • The glowing portals begin to suck loose objects and people toward them, threatening to pull the whole plaza into chaos.

Sentence starters

  1. Suddenly, I stepped forward and felt the air thicken around the nearest portal.
  2. The plaza smelled of warm metal and rain, and the towers seemed to lean in to listen as if the whole city were alive.

…and 1 more with your free account.

What's in the full resource

  • Complications
  • Brainstorming Prompts
  • Vocabulary Support
  • Sentence Starters
  • Dialogue Prompts
  • Writing Challenges
  • Sentence Variety
  • Creative Twists
  • Writing Checklist
  • Reflective Questions
  • Collaborative Writing Ideas
  • Printable teacher and student PDFs

NAPLAN writing criteria this resource targets

Audience Text structure Ideas Character and setting Vocabulary Cohesion Paragraphing Sentence structure Punctuation Spelling

See how Writesy aligns to the NAPLAN writing criteria.

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