Yasmin the Soccer Star

Saadia Faruqi's Yasmin the Soccer Star is a very short school story for 5 year olds about a girl who really, really does not want to go in goal.

What happens

There's a new gym teacher at Yasmin's school. Coach Garcia arrives with a whistle and a ball, and everyone is delighted except Yasmin.

She's watched a lot of football on TV with her Baba. As far as she can tell, the players kick and elbow each other and fall over a great deal. It looks dangerous.

So she starts negotiating. Could she be the cheerleader? She can shout very loudly. Could she be the water girl? Everyone looks thirsty. Could she be the referee, seeing as she remembers all the rules?

Coach Garcia points at the net.

Honestly, who hasn't watched a child do this? The careful list of alternative jobs, every one of them somehow more important than the one they've just been given.

It's three tiny chapters and about five minutes of reading, a sentence or two at a time. Which makes it a lovely thing to put in front of a reader who's just starting to manage a book alone, because the whole story fits inside their attention span and they get to finish it themselves.

Just so you know, it's American, so the game is soccer all the way through. A child here may want telling once that soccer is football. Nothing else will trip them up.

Yasmin's family is Pakistani American and speaks English and Urdu at home. She calls her dad Baba and he calls her jaan, and both words are explained at the back with a handful of others, which your reader can happily skip or pore over depending on the sort of child they are.

There's no big lesson bolted on the end either. Yasmin is scared, Yasmin gets put in goal anyway, and how she gets on is the whole of it. At five, that's exactly right.

What to read next

For four more of her, there's Meet Yasmin! in the library. Same girl, same family, four whole stories in one go, including one where she draws a map of her own neighbourhood and appoints herself an explorer.