The book reveals how castles were built, not only for people to live in, but also to keep enemies out. Detailed illustrations show the materials that were used and special precautions that were taken to ensure castles would provide adequate defence. Photographs show several examples of castles and castle remains that can still be visited today.

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

* Text type - A report and explanation text.

* There is an index on page 21 and a labelled 3-D diagram of a castle on pages 22 and 23 providing an opportunity to recap the information.

* Curriculum links - Art and Design: Can buildings speak?; History: Famous events (Norman Invasion).

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 2012 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Maggie Freeman has published two children's novels and five factual primary literacy books. She has taught in community education for about fifteen years, writes poetry and started what became the Essex Poetry Festival. 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.