The Dragon in My Backpack

Year 3 · Fantasy

The Dragon in My Backpack is a free, NAPLAN-aligned fantasy writing resource for Year 3 students. It includes a story starter, complication, tiered vocabulary and scaffolds mapped to the Australian Curriculum (AC9).

Year 3 AC9E3LE05 AC9E3LA06 AC9E3LA10 AC9E3LA11 AC9E3LA04 AC9E3LY06

Supports the Year 3 achievement standard (creating written texts).

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

Bella found an old, dusty egg at the back of the school library. She never expected it to hatch. The next morning she heard a tiny sneeze from her backpack. She looked inside her backpack. She found a baby dragon no bigger than her pencil case. It blinked up at her with glowing golden eyes.

The complication

The baby dragon becomes sick and Bella must find a secret herb in the school garden that only grows at dawn.
A teacher discovers the dragon and wants to take it to the science centre, so Bella must hide it or persuade the teacher otherwise.
The dragon grows quickly and begins to sing loudly at assembly, drawing attention from the principal and every student.

Sentence starters

Action opener: Bella crept to the back shelf and lifted the egg carefully into her bag.
After: After the tiny sneeze, Bella swallowed hard and zipped up her bag so the dragon would not fall out.

…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 20 July 2026

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