The Great Sleigh Search

Year 5

The Great Sleigh Search 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.

In the heart of the North Pole, Santa's workshop hummed with cheerful laughter and frantic chatter. Elves of all shapes and sizes darted between towering stacks of colourful presents. Their tiny faces were scrunched in concentration. They looked high and low for something very important. At the centre of it all Santa stood. He was usually jolly but now his brow was furrowed. He scratched his head and looked at the empty space where his sleigh should be. "We must find it soon," he said, with a hint of worry in his voice, "or Christmas might not happen this year!"

The complication

  • The sleigh was hidden by a mischievous reindeer who thinks it is a new toy and refuses to give it back.
  • Someone accidentally packed the sleigh onto a delivery sled bound for the wrong North Pole village.
  • The sleigh has a broken harness and cannot fly until the elves find a missing metal buckle from Santa's grandfather.

Sentence starters

  1. Santa grabbed his lantern and raced past the toy benches, calling the elves by name as he searched.
  2. Suddenly the smell of burnt tinsel and hot cocoa drifted through the air, and everyone froze for a moment.

…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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