Two beautifully told traditional tales by Beverley Birch. `The Water Thief' is about the mischievous antics of Hyena and how crafty Tortoise plays him at his own game. `Lumbwi and the Gazelle' is about a moving friendship, but when Lumbwi embarks on a new life he seems to forget about his old friend, to dreadful consequences.

Emerald/Band 15 books provide a widening range of genres including science fiction and biography, prompting more ways to respond to texts.

Text type: Traditional tales from another culture

Curriculum links: English: fairy stories, myths and legends

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 48 pages in this book. This book was published 2017 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Beverley was born in London, grew up in Kenya and came to Britain for the first time to take A levels. She graduated from Cambridge with a degree in Economics and Sociology. After travelling in Africa, America, Europe and the Middle East, Beverley joined Penguin as an editor. Since then she has continued to work in publishing - at present she combines writing and working as an editor here at Hodder. She has two daughters and is married to photographer Nick Birch. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years.