The "Treetops" titles in Oxford Reading Tree's series of fiction offer built-in progression for pupils aged 7 to 11. Specially written for children who need the support of carefully monitored language levels, the stories are accessible, motivating and humorous. The series is organized into Oxford Reading Tree stages (from Stage 10 to Stage 15), 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 within the framework of the National Literacy Strategy and includes activities on photocopiable sheets. This story is for stage 15 of the scheme.

 

This book is part of a book series called Oxford Reading Tree .

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 88 pages in this book. This book was published 1999 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.