The Hat Maker sets off on his weekly visit to market, armed with an overflowing cart of hats to sell - but when he stops for a nap in the woods a group of chimps take the opportunity to steal his hats. Will the Hat Maker learn a valuable lesson, or will the chimps always be one step ahead? This story, set in Tanzania, was written by Adam Guillain.

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

* Text type: A humorous story.

* Children can trace the Hat Maker's route from his shop, through the woods and to the market on pages 14-15, providing plenty of discussion opportunities.

* Curriculum links: Knowledge and Understanding of the world.

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

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 2011 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Charlotte Guillain worked as a bookseller, an English teacher and an editor before becoming an author. She has written more than 100 books, both fiction and non-fiction. She always wanted to be a writer and her top tip is to read as much as you can. Adam Guillain lives near Oxford with his wife, Charlotte, their two children. Adam and his wife have written several picture books together as well as young fiction. They like to be as silly as possible! Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years.