Narrative Writing Game Years 5 and 6 | Creative Writing Digital Unit | Emberwick

A narrative writing game: a digital creative writing unit for Years 5 and 6 where each student writes on their own device and every finished piece relights a painted harbour town. One offline HTML file, no logins, nothing to install, with a teacher console included.

The lights of a little harbour town are going out, and only stories can bring them back. Your students become Keepers of the Lantern Archive, an old library under the lighthouse in the harbour town of Emberwick. A grey quiet called the Hush has crept in and the town has gone dark. Each room of the Archive teaches one part of writing a good story, and every short piece a student finishes lights a lamp, warms a painted room back to colour and lights more windows in their own harbour skyline.

This edition is written for upper primary: shorter prompts, simpler words and tasks of four to six minutes, with help built into every step. It uses the same town, painted art, characters and voices as the Years 7 to 9 game.

WHAT STUDENTS DO

• Answer the Archive's letter, sign their Keeper's name and choose a lantern.
• Work through six rooms: exact nouns and strong verbs (the Ink Garden), the senses (the Window Room), show, don't tell (the Portrait Room), speech marks (the Whispering Gallery), mood (the Mirror Hall) and trimming a draft (the Bindery). An optional seventh, the Spyglass Stair, practises keeping to "I" or "he" and "she".
• Light three Lamps in every room, each a small step harder than the last.
• Finish with the Unfinished Tale, their own story written in three short stages that relights the great lighthouse lamp.

HELP FOR EVERY WRITER

Every Lamp has a Helping Hand (three small steps and a fill-the-gaps frame), a Stretch task for confident writers, sentence starters, tricky words explained, a worked example and "Read it to me" buttons that use the browser's own voice, so they work offline.

FOR THE TEACHER

The teacher console turns each student's Lantern Code, a 16-character code that holds progress only (never names or writing), into a class skyline for the board and a private progress table. It also has a five-minute mini-lesson for every room and every stage of the Unfinished Tale, ready to show on the board.

HOW IT RUNS

• One HTML file. Open it in Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari.
• No logins, no server, nothing to install.
• Works offline. The painted art, voices, music and fonts are all inside the file.
• Australian or US English: a Spelling choice in Settings switches the on-screen spelling. It follows the browser's language on a first visit. The recorded voices stay the same either way.
• Student writing saves in the browser as they type. A Keeper's Key lets a student carry on at another computer.

CURRICULUM

Written for the Australian Curriculum: English (v9) in Years 5 and 6. Every room and Lamp is mapped to five curricula: the Australian Curriculum (v9), the US Common Core State Standards, the National Curriculum in England (Key Stage 2), Cambridge Primary English and the IB PYP. The teacher console shows the links for each.

WHAT'S INCLUDED

• Emberwick: The Lantern Archive, Years 5 and 6 student game (one offline HTML file)
• A slim copy of the game (about 14 MB) for slow networks or small drives: no music, and Read it to me uses the computer's own voice
• The teacher console (one offline HTML file) with Lantern Codes, class skyline, progress table, curriculum view and mini-lessons
• Six writing rooms plus the optional Spyglass Stair, three Lamps in each
• The Unfinished Tale capstone in three stages
• Helping Hand, Stretch and read-aloud on every Lamp
• A voiced opening story, original music and painted artwork throughout
• For Your IT Team (PDF, 1 page)
• START HERE quick guide

WHICH EMBERWICK EDITION DO I NEED?

All five editions are set in the same painted town and are in the Star Class Academy store.

• Teacher-Led Edition, Years 5 and 6: 12 lessons you teach from one screen, with a 32-page printed Keeper's Journal. No student devices needed.
• Teacher-Led Edition, Years 3 and 4: 10 lessons plus a bonus lesson on one screen, a 28-page Keeper's Journal and fill-the-gaps First Lamp pages.
• Teacher-Led Edition, Years 7 to 9: 12 lessons plus a bonus lesson, a 48-page Keeper's Journal, three Lamps in every lesson and Relief Lesson Cards.
• Student Game Edition, Years 5 and 6 (this one): each student writes on their own device, with the teacher console.
• Student Game Edition, Years 7 to 9: the full game for older students, with the teacher console.

Teaching from the projector? Choose a Teacher-Led Edition. Want students writing on their own devices? Choose a Student Game Edition.

WORKS WITH THE TEACHER-LED EDITION FOR YEARS 5 AND 6

If you also have the Teacher-Led Edition for Years 5 and 6, the two work as one unit: you teach each room's lesson on the projector, then your students write in the same room of the game that week. The START HERE guide in the zip explains how. You don't need it: this game is complete on its own.

HOW IT WAS MADE

The painted art, the music and most of the voices were made with AI tools and then chosen and edited by us. Two of the voices are our own.

LICENCE

For use by the purchasing teacher with their own classes. You may put these files on a password-protected or school-internal site (such as your school's learning platform) for your own classes. Please don't post them on a public website or share them outside your classes.

Questions? starclassacademy.com/help?ref=sh or hello@starclassacademy.com

Made by two teachers, one primary and one secondary, who have taught in classrooms around the world.