The Lost City Beneath the Waves

Year 5 · Adventure

The Lost City Beneath the Waves is a free, NAPLAN-aligned adventure 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.

The water was cold and deep, but I hardly noticed as I descended into the heart of the lost city. My heart raced with excitement and awe. What had once been a thriving metropolis, now stood in eerie silence beneath the sea, its grand domes, towering columns, and statues, now home to coral and fish. We had discovered this place by accident, but now that we were here, we couldn’t turn back. The city was older than anything we had ever known, filled with secrets that had been buried beneath the waves for centuries. But who or what had left it here?

The complication

  1. A sudden collapse of a domed passage traps I and we under a fallen archway with rising water, so we must find another way out before the air runs short.
  2. A rival exploration team arrives and claims the lost city as their discovery, forcing I and we to decide whether to protect the secret or argue for credit.
  3. Strange carvings begin to glow and an unseen current steers I and we toward a sealed chamber that may contain the city’s greatest secret or its most dangerous guardian.

Sentence starters

  1. Suddenly, I kicked harder and the column of silt clouded the water around us. (connective opener)
  2. I brushed my fingers across a mosaic and felt the grit of centuries on my skin as fish darted through broken arches. (action opener)

…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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