The House That Disappears

Year 5

The House That Disappears 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 night, the house disappears. It’s as though it was never there, leaving only the foggy air and the empty, overgrown path that leads to it. My friends and I used to dare each other to go up to the front door, to knock and see what happened. But the stories… they were so strange. Some said the house was cursed, others said it was the home of someone who never left. I didn’t believe it, of course. I thought it was just another one of those stories meant to scare us. But when I walked past it that night, curiosity tugging at me like a thread, I saw it. The house was there. It shouldn’t have been, but it was, and as I stepped closer, I felt the air grow colder, the shadows deepen.

The complication

  • The house appears but only when the narrator is alone, and each time it shows a different locked door that the narrator cannot open.
  • The narrator’s friends start to forget the house entirely and insist it never existed, which makes the narrator question their own memory.
  • The narrator discovers footsteps leading away from the house into the fog, but following them means leaving the safety of home and possibly not returning.

Sentence starters

  1. Suddenly, I noticed the front door was slightly open and my heart sped up.
  2. I stepped forward, feeling the damp fog cling to my jumper and the grass whisper under my shoes.

…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.

Last updated

Register free to unlock the full resource — scaffolds, vocabulary support, sentence starters and more.

Get free access →

Or see today's free resource →