The Moonlight Door

Year 5

The Moonlight Door 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.

Lily was just about to go to sleep when she saw it. It wasn’t a dream, and it wasn’t a trick of the light. There, standing in the middle of her bedroom, was a door, glowing faintly with a soft blue light. She blinked, rubbed her eyes, and stared again. The door wasn’t part of the wardrobe, it was something new. It looked like it was made of starlight, swirling and beckoning her to step closer. Lily hesitated, her heart racing with excitement and fear. What was this door, and where would it lead?

The complication

  • Lily steps toward the door and it begins to close, trapping her fingers between the starlight and the bedroom floor.
  • When Lily opens the door, she finds a version of her bedroom that is wrong in small ways, and she must work out which changes are harmless and which are dangerous.
  • The door leads to a place that drains memory slowly, so Lily must find a way back before she forgets who she is and where she lives.

Sentence starters

  1. Suddenly Lily’s hand hovered over the handle and she realised she could hear a soft music coming from the other side.
  2. The room smelled faintly of rain and ozone as the blue light painted the walls an impossible colour.

…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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