The Advanced Ant Farm

Year 4 · Fantasy

The Advanced Ant Farm is a free, NAPLAN-aligned fantasy writing resource for Year 4 students. It includes a story starter, complication, tiered vocabulary and scaffolds mapped to the Australian Curriculum (AC9).

Year 4 AC9E4LE05 AC9E4LA06 AC9E4LA04 AC9E4LA12 AC9E4LA11 AC9E4LY06

Supports the Year 4 achievement standard (creating written texts).

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

My name is Oliver, and I was one of the most curious kids you could ever meet. Ever since I was little, I loved learning about nature, and my favourite hobby was collecting bugs. I spent hours watching ants in their colonies, observing how they worked together. One day, I got the idea to build my very own ant farm. But when I set it up, something strange began to happen. As the ants dug, they created tunnels and chambers that I’d never seen before. Over time, my little ant farm started to look more like a city! Skyscrapers, roads, flying machines, it was a whole bustling metropolis, all built by ants! The more I watched, the more amazed I became. These ants weren’t just regular ants. They were advanced. I couldn’t believe my eyes. How could this be possible?

The complication

  • Oliver notices the ant city expanding beyond the glass and the ants begin building tunnels under his bedroom floor, risking damage to the house.
  • A rival group of larger insects arrives and starts sabotaging the ant metropolis, forcing Oliver to decide whether to intervene or let nature take its course.
  • The ants start communicating with Oliver in unexpected ways, but their requests are confusing and may lead him into danger if he tries to help without understanding them.

Sentence starters

  1. Action opener: Oliver reached for his magnifying glass and traced the newest tunnel with trembling fingers.
  2. Suddenly, I realised the flying machines were not made of leaves but of something that gleamed like metal.

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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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