The Underground Library

Year 6 · Fantasy

The Underground Library is a free, NAPLAN-aligned fantasy writing resource for Year 6 students. It includes a story starter, complication, tiered vocabulary and scaffolds mapped to the Australian Curriculum (AC9).

Year 6 AC9E6LE05 AC9E6LA05 AC9E6LA08 AC9E6LA09 AC9E6LA04 AC9E6LY06

Supports the Year 6 achievement standard (creating written texts).

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

Sam had always loved exploring her family’s old bookshop, but she never expected to find something like this. While cleaning out the basement one rainy afternoon, she stumbled upon a wooden trapdoor hidden behind old boxes of forgotten books. Curiosity bubbled inside her as she opened the creaky door, revealing a dark stairwell leading down to a hidden underground library. The shelves stretched up higher than she could see, and the faint flicker of candlelight revealed dusty old books stacked from floor to ceiling. But as she stepped inside, she heard something, a soft whisper coming from the books themselves.

The complication

  • Sam realises the whispered voice belongs to a book that will only speak if Sam solves a riddle, and the riddle requires an item that was stolen from the shop years ago.
  • Candles gutter and a hidden staircase collapses, trapping Sam in the lower stacks with a creature made of paper that rearranges the shelves into a maze.
  • The whisper reveals a family secret: every generation must choose one book to keep or the library will vanish, and Sam must decide whether to save a book that contains her great-grandmother’s lost memories.

Sentence starters

  1. Suddenly Sam strained her ears and stepped closer to the whispering shelf, heart thudding like a drum.
  2. Sam wiped a grey smear from a leather spine and tasted the cool, damp air of the underground like a forgotten cellar full of secrets.

…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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