Jonny Zucker 
Hitting the Basket 

Atash and Gulnar are the star players on their schools basketball team. They are playing against Mayland and no matter how hard they try they just can’t beat them, but are Mayland playing by the rules? Water Life Salima lives in a beautiful village in Ethiopia that is visited by a group of water engineers. They try to help her village with a new water supply. The new tap does not work, but Salima has an idea that may help. The Travellers series has the lowest reading level of all our reluctant reader collections — age 5-8. The stories are incredibly short — only 100-300 words each, and each book in the set of 14 titles contains 2-3 stories. Collecting the stories in this way gives more of an appearance of a ‘real’ book even though the stories are bite-sized, which helps to make the reader feel less self-conscious that they are reading something ‘specialised’. The language level throughout this set of books is very low, and features such as short sentences, line spacing and illustrations help to create an encouraging experience for the reader.