Nothing ever happens in the sleepy village of Bani Rashid, which is why Jamal is so excited when an explorer from Europe takes an interest in his home town. At first, Jamal tries to impress Mr Moneta - until it becomes clear that this visitor wants to do more than just admire the statues that Jamal sits beneath and tells his secrets to. Jamal realises that he needs to prevent Moneta from taking the Smiling Stones away ... and from discovering an amazing lost chamber of riches hidden beneath Bani Rashid. But how can a penniless village boy defeat a man the size of a giant? A battle of wits has begun, but as the heat of the summer grows, there can only be one winner ...

The Smiling Stones 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: 7-8 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 .

LEILA RASHEED has gained an MA in both Children's Literature and Creative Writing. She started work at Reading Is Fundamental, a children's literacy charity, before moving to Belgium. Leila now works as the children's bookseller for Waterstone's in Brussels.