Nick has just moved to Pit Street, so he and his best friend Jess help to unpack and explore the new house, including the spooky cellar. But what they don't realise, is that something else has been living deep in the cellar and doesn't want to be disturbed ... With an unexpected twist in its tale, this wonderful story was written by Simon Cheshire.

* Collins Big Cat Progress books are specifically designed for children at Key Stage 2 who have a Key Stage 1 reading level, giving them age-appropriate texts that they can read, building their confidence and fostering positive attitudes towards reading.

* Text type: A mystery story

* Curriculum links: Citizenship

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

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

This book is at the following key stages: Key Stage 1, Key Stage 2 . A key stage is any of the fixed stages into which the national curriculum is divided, each having its own prescribed course of study. At the end of each stage, pupils are required to complete standard assessment tasks. KS1 covers school years 1 and 2, and ages 5-7 years. KS2 covers school years 4, 5 and 6, and ages 8-11 years.

This book has been graded for interest at Collins Stage 12. 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 2013 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Simon Cheshire has written lots of fiction books for children of all ages across many genres, including titles in the Black Cats series for A&C Black and the Saxby Smart detective series for Picadilly.