An informative picture book that presents a larger-than-life look at the fly and explains that flies can be very useful - despite their capacity to carry germs and cause disease! The humorous cartoons, captivating photographs and informative captions provide a fascinating insight into this common and pesky insect.

* Turquoise/ Band 7 books offer literay language and extended descriptions, with longer sentences and a wide range of unfamiliar terms.

* Text type - A non-chronological report.

* Pages 22 and 23 give children the chance to recap and discuss the information covered.

* Curriculum links - Science: Plants and animals in the local environment.

* This information book is paired with a fictional story on a similar theme: Harry the Clever Spider by Julia Jarman.

* This book has been levelled for Reading Recovery.

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

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 24 pages in this book. This book was published 2004 by HarperCollins Publishers .

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. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Janice Marriott is an award-winning children's author, of both fiction and non-fiction, most recently winning the 2007 NZ Post Junior Fiction award for Thor's Tale. Janice lives and works in central Wellington.