"Treetops" is the "Oxford Reading Tree" series of fiction with built-in progression for pupils aged seven to 11. Specially written for children who need the support of carefully monitored language levels, this story, entitled "The Personality Potion", seeks to be accessible, motivating and humorous. The series is organized into "Oxford Reading Tree" stages (from stage ten to stage 14), with each stage introducing more complex narrative forms, including: flashbacks and changes in viewpoint; descriptive writing; extended reading vocabulary; and more pages, more text, and fewer illustrations. Each stage is supported by the "Teacher's Guide", which offers guidance on using "Treetops" to assess children's reading ability, and includes a variety of activities, many on photocopiable sheets.

 

This book features in the following series: Oxford Reading Tree, Treetops .

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 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 56 pages in this book. This book was published 1996 by Oxford University Press .

Alan MacDonald lives in Nottingham. He writes both non-fiction and fiction as well as writing for radio and TV. He has a particularly good track record for writing page-turning and accessible historical books.