The Day My Shadow Went Missing

Year 3

The Day My Shadow Went Missing is a free, NAPLAN-aligned 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.

Ethan always watched his shadow. It stretched and danced and it followed his every move. One morning it was gone. There was no shadow under the sun and there was no dark shape trailing him on the pavement. Then he saw something out of the corner of his eye. He saw his shadow run across the street and wave at him. Then it disappeared into the woods.

The complication

  • Ethan tries to follow the shadow into the woods but gets lost when the trees block the sun and his own shadow vanishes.
  • The shadow starts acting on its own in town, causing small problems like moving objects or hiding things, and people begin to notice and blame Ethan.
  • Ethan learns the shadow is trapped by an old object hidden in the forest and must decide whether to free it even if doing so puts him in danger.

Sentence starters

  1. Action opener: Ethan crept to the edge of the footpath and peered into the trees, hoping to catch a glimpse of his shadow.
  2. After: After he chased the waving shape, Ethan realised the sun made the woods look darker than usual.

…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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