When children reach the top of Key Stage 2 and are below average readers, they need to practice reading skills with materials that are attractive, motivating, and accessible; variety is important too. These stories will be useful for pupils whose first language is not English.

Each book in the series contains three stories featuring Ali and Sam and their friends from Sledmere Junior School. Each story: uses contexts that are familiar to most pupils, for example the school setting, home/local community; is written in natural language style with simple grammatical structures; highlights "tricky" words on each page to help readers "sort them out" without interrupting the story; features a multi-cultural, working-class community; and is accompanied by questions to be used of for checking understanding and facilitating discussion.

This book is suitable for Key Stage 2. KS2 covers school years 4, 5 and 6, and ages 8-11 years. A key stage is any of the fixed stages into which the national curriculum is divided, each having its own prescribed course of study. At the end of each stage, pupils are required to complete standard assessment tasks. 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 80 pages in this book. This book was published 2005 by Taylor & Francis Ltd .