The "Fact Finders" series is the non-fiction component of Oxford's popular infant reading scheme. It introduces non-fiction books to infant children, and focuses on developing the information retrieval and handling skills they will need in later years. The series encompasses a whole range of genres, illustration styles and subject focuses. The titles are grouped into units which progress in difficulty from Unit A to F. Links with the scheme's storybooks in terms of content and level are given in the accompanying teachers' guides, which also offer teaching strategies and photocopiable activities.

 

This book features in the following series: Fact Finders, Oxford Reading Tree, Where People Live .

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 Synthetic phonics method. (This can also be referred to as 'blended phonics' or 'inductive phonics'). A phonics 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. In Synthetic Phonics, children are taught to sound and blend from the start of reading tuition. Children are taught a small group of letter sounds and then shown how these can be co-articulated to pronounce unfamiliar words. Other groups of letters are then taught and the children blend them in order to pronounce new words. The pronunciation of the word is discovered through sounding and blending, and spelling by mapping sounds to letters. Consonant blends that cannot be read by blending are explicitly taught.

There are 32 pages in this book. This book was published 1995 by Oxford University Press .

Roderick Hunt started out as a teacher, but began writing for children in 1970. He collaborated with Alex Brychta on a series of children books for the Oxford Reading Tree which had an animated spin-off, The Magic Key series. Roderick and Alex won the prestigious Outstanding Achievement Award at the Education Resources Awards 2009. Now he says, "On my income tax form I put down my profession as storyteller. It never fails to raise an eyebrow. " He lives in London.