The Midnight Train

Year 5

The Midnight Train is a free, NAPLAN-aligned writing resource for Year 5 students. It includes a story starter, complication, tiered vocabulary and scaffolds mapped to the Australian Curriculum (AC9).

Year 5 AC9E5LE05 AC9E5LA05 AC9E5LA08 AC9E5LA09 AC9E5LA04 AC9E5LY06

Supports the Year 5 achievement standard (creating written texts).

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

Every year, at exactly midnight on Halloween night, a train appears at the old, forgotten station on the edge of town. This train, cloaked in a veil of mist and mystery, has always been a subject of legend. No one has ever seen it during the daylight, and yet, on this one night, it rolls in from the fog like a ghost, its train carriages glowing faintly, as if alive. That night, I stood at the station with my eyes wide open, holding an old, crumpled ticket that I had found in an antique store, a ticket for a train that was said to carry passengers from different time periods. The train screeched to a halt in front of me, and before I could even take a breath, the doors opened, inviting me in.

The complication

  • The ticket I hold only allows one person to travel and someone else on the platform claims it is theirs, forcing me to choose who travels.
  • The train begins to pull away but one carriage glows more brightly and a voice from inside calls my name, suggesting something from my past is trapped aboard.
  • As I step on, the conductor reveals the train can only return at dawn if I solve a riddle about time, or I will be carried into a different century forever.

Sentence starters

  1. Suddenly, the carriage light pulsed and I felt the station spin beneath my feet.
  2. The mist smelled of rain and oil, and the platform lights hummed like a distant heartbeat.

…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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