It's Jack's first day at Glendale School. He's a star goalie, so why isn't he happy when he's asked to join the team?

* Themes of family and friendship are explored in this exciting tale of school football.

* Text type - A story with a familiar setting.

* The storyboard on pp 22-23 offers children the opportunity to recap and retell the story in their own words.

This book is part of a book series called Collins Big Cat .

This book has been graded for interest at 5-7 years. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

There are 24 pages in this book. This book was published 2019 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Mike Phillips is the author of several books and screenplays as well as his award-winning Sam Dean novels. In 1997 he was Writer in Residence at London's South Bank Centre. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Catherine MacPhail is an award-winning author with an excellent reputation in schools and bookshops. Her other Barrington Stoke books are Picking on Percy, Sticks and Stones and A Kind of Magic. She lives in Greenock.