A patterned picture book about a family outing to the beach. The children are delighted when they spot seagulls, an ice-cream van, sand and even what they believe to be the sea, but are they at the beach yet? Lisa Smith's illustrations capture the children's excitement as they wait impatiently for their journey to end.

* Red A/Band 2A books offer predictable text with familiar objects and actions, combined with simple story development.

* Text type - A story with predictable structure and patterned language.

* Pages 14 and 15 show a labelled beach scene, incorporating the key words from the text, and providing an opportunity to recount the text.

* This story is paired with a non-fiction book on the same theme: Shapes on the Seashore by Frances Ridley.

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

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 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.

There are 16 pages in this book. This book was published 2012 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Lisa Smith was born in Toronto. It was in India, where she spent some years of her childhood, that Lisa and her sister developed a love for books. Later she graduated from the Ontario College of Art. She lives with her husband in Mississauga, Ontario. Alison Hawes is a freelance writer specializing in fiction and non-fiction for children. She has been a school teacher, a classroom assistant, and playgroup helper but now writes full time. She has written over 80 books for schools, stories and articles for BBC Playdays. Jonathan was born in 1965, the son of a rig fitter and a primary school teacher. He first developed his skills as a writer and illustrator while studying architecture, illustrating poems and lyrics that he had written. After leaving college, he worked as an architect for several years, before pursuing a career in children's books. In addition to writing books such as Bringing Down the Moon, and Ruby Flew Too, he also paper-engineers pop-up books.