The steam train is pulling out of the station, it heads to the hills, into a rainstorm, through a tunnel and out the other side into the sunshine and to the seaside. Follow the rhythm and the rhyme of this simple poem and travel with the train on its wonderful adventure, beautifully illustrated by Rosalind Hudson.

* Blue/Band 4 books offer longer, repeated patterns with sequential events and integrated literary and natural language.

* Text type: A poem.

* A map of the journey the steam train takes on pages 14-15 helps children to recap the poem and provides a wealth of speaking and listening opportunities.

* Curriculum links: Music.

* 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 scheme has multiple levels. 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 16 pages in this book. This book was published 2010 by HarperCollins Publishers .

A former teacher and head of sixth form, Ian Whybrow is now a full time author. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years.