The Reflection That Wasn’t Me

Year 6

The Reflection That Wasn’t Me is a free, NAPLAN-aligned 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 had always been told to stay away from the old mirror in the attic. It was a family heirloom, and no one ever used it, except when it was time to clean it, which, it seemed, wasn’t very often. The dusty frame and its faded glass seemed to carry a deep history I didn't understand. But tonight, when the storm raged outside and the house creaked with every gust of wind, I couldn’t resist. I stood in front of the mirror, staring into my own reflection. But as the flickering candlelight cast shadows, something felt wrong. My reflection didn’t look like me. There, staring back, was a child I didn’t recognise, dressed in strange clothes and with a face full of sorrow. The reflection lifted a hand, no, it wasn’t me, it was someone else, and as I reached for the mirror, everything changed.

The complication

  • The child in the mirror refuses to step back into the glass and starts swapping places with me more often, so I find myself trapped in the mirror world for minutes at a time.
  • A family secret is revealed: the mirror can show the past, and the sorrowful child is an ancestor who needs help to finish something, but helping them risks erasing my own memories.
  • The storm wakes something else in the attic that recognises the mirror’s visitor and wants the mirror for its own dark purpose.

Sentence starters

  1. Later, I realised the mirror did not only show faces but also small, moving memories that belonged to someone else.
  2. I reached out and the glass was colder than the rain as if it held a winter inside.

…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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