It's a game of hide and seek and Dad the crab is looking for Tim, but he can't find him anywhere. As he hunts around the seabed he finds lots of other crabs in different hiding places, but will he ever find Tim? Written and illustrated by Shoo Rayner this is a fun story with lively, colourful artwork.

* Pink/1A - a simple story with a familiar setting

* Text type - Fiction

* The focus phonemes in this book are s, a, t, i, p, n, m, d

* A picture of the seabed on pages 14-15 shows all the crabs and their hiding places to help children recap the story

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

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. 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 16 pages in this book. This book was published 2010 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Shoo Rayner is the author and illustrator of many well-loved books, including THE GINGER NINJA and RICKY ROCKET series. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years.