To the outside world, the Smedleys look like any other family: Mum, Dad, son, daughter, hamster ... and a grandpa dozing in the corner. Looks can be deceiving, however, because the Smedleys have a secret ... a very BIG secret. They are actually a daredevil team of crime-solving football ninjas!

Jez Smedley can't believe his luck when a project on the theme of teamwork leads to him becoming the captain of the school's first five-a-side football team. The only problem is that Throgmorton United have no goalkeeper on the morning of their first match! However, this is almost the least of their worries when they start to notice football pitches around the town are being built on faster than they can play matches on them. No criminal is safe while the Smedleys are on the case: it's time to stop the disappearing pitch disaster!

Jez Smedley: Diary of a Football Ninja:Disappearing Pitch Disaster is part of the Reading Planet range of books for Stars (Lime) to Supernova (Red+) band. Children aged 7-11 will be inspired to love reading through the gripping stories and fascinating information books created by top authors. Reading Planet books have been carefully levelled to support children in becoming fluent and confident readers. Each book features useful notes and questions to support reading at home and develop comprehension skills.
Reading age: 9-10 years

This book is part of a book series called Rising Stars Reading Planet .

This book is aimed at children in primary school. 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 64 pages in this book. This book was published 2019 by Rising Stars UK Ltd .

Working together as a crack author-illustrator team, Knife & Packer have written and illustrated more than 30 books for children.