It was Golden Week, as the three consecutive May bank-holidays are called here, and I took the opportunity of a bit of down time to write and publish the fourth Hana Walker Junior High School short story for Japanese first year junior high school kids learning English. The blurb is as follows:
Aiko cries: “Where’s my lunchbox?” There is a thief stealing gyoza dumplings. Everyone suspects Takuma. Hana must find the thief to save her friend from big trouble.
My name is Hana Walker. I am 13 years old. My Mum is Japanese, my Dad is English. Japanese call me “half”. But I am not 50/50. I am 100 percent me. I speak English, but I don’t speak Japanese. I go to a Japanese junior high school. I solve mysteries by looking and thinking. Every day is a mystery…
This series of Hana Walker mystery short stories is designed to engage students of English as a foreign language who typically are in their first year of junior high school. Every book features an engaging mystery with the same cast of characters, a vocabulary section and set of questions. The books can be used as the focus of a reading and discussion lesson or given as homework for students to read by themselves.
Word Count: 1,758
Tenses: Simple present, present continuous
Target language: Modals of can and want
The ebooks and paperbacks are available from every Amazon site worldwide including Amazon.com, Amazon.co.jp and Amazon.co.uk too.
Patrick Sherriff 