Wizards and Lizards

Years 7 - 8

Three-week Program

Wizards and witches and lizards, oh my!

In this program, students will immerse themselves in the joy of fantasy world-building. Students will generate ideas for their own realm and begin to populate it with lore, creatures and characters. Each week, students will have opportunities to use gaming strategies and other constraints to playfully explore the mechanics and conventions of the fantasy genre. At the end of the program students will have the beginnings of a fantastic compendium.

• Australian Curriculum Outcomes

  Create literary texts that adapt or combine aspects of texts students have experienced in innovative ways (ACELT1618)

  Experiment with text structures and language features and their effects in creating literary texts, for example, using imagery, sentence variation, metaphor and word choice (ACELT1800)

  Plan, draft and publish imaginative, informative and persuasive texts, choosing and experimenting with text structures, language features, images and digital resources appropriate to purpose and audience (ACELY1714)

• NSW Syllabus Outcomes

  EN3-CWT-01

  Plans, creates and revises written texts for multiple purposes and audiences through selection of text features, sentence-level grammar, punctuation and word-level language

  EN3-UARL-01

  Analyses representations of ideas in literature through narrative, character, imagery, symbol and connotation, and adapts these representations when creating texts

• Sample Student Writing

  (Excerpt of Dragon description)
  The dragon stood intimidatingly on the plains, its eyes glowing like a cat's as its thin pupils watched. It stretched out its wings revealing them to be half feathers and half bat-like. Its feathers were as silver and shiny as polished coins. As it shook its armoured and spiked tail, it made a loud clank like someone hammering nails into a stone floor. Its body and arms were muscular and strong, it clawed at the earth with claws like blades, no, swords. It watched before breathing a blue flame that made sunlight in the summer feel like ice. Its fire cracked and burned the grasses slowly. Its horns were branched like antlers, in a banded pattern. Legend says dragons get a new band for every year of life, if that’s true, this one must be thousands of years old. It had whiskers behind its eyes that twitched as they sensed my presence.
  
  -Alden, HERRD Homeschool Group, 2026

Available in Semester 1, 2026.