It was Pirate Captain Codspawn's birthday. But what was his birthday surprise? It wasn't the beetles in the butter. It wasn't the spiders in the sugar. And it wasn't the special pirate pie that Cook had baked. But it was the best present a pirate could ever want!

* Gold/Band 9 fiction books offer developing readers literary language and stories with distinctive characters.

* Text type - A humorous story.

* Pages 22 and 23 feature a recipe for pirate pie, with ingredients that would test the stomachs of even the most bloodthirsty pirates. This is a great starting point for further discussion and activities outside the reading session.

* Curriculum links - Geography: Going to the Seaside, Where in the world is Barnaby Bear?

* This story is paired with a non-fiction book on the same theme: How to be a Pirate, also by Scoular Anderson.

* This book has been levelled for Reading Recovery.

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

This book is part of a book series called Collins Big Cat .

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 24 pages in this book. This book was published 2005 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Scoular Anderson is a popular author/illustrator whose previous books on our list include the very successful MY FIRST JOKE BOOK. He lives in Argyll, Scotland. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Jonathan was born in 1965, the son of a rig fitter and a primary school teacher. He first developed his skills as a writer and illustrator while studying architecture, illustrating poems and lyrics that he had written. After leaving college, he worked as an architect for several years, before pursuing a career in children's books. In addition to writing books such as Bringing Down the Moon, and Ruby Flew Too, he also paper-engineers pop-up books.