Mars is the closest planet to Earth, but how much do we know about it? Written by science author Steve Parker, this fact-packed book takes a look at the physical features of the planet and at the amazing exploration that has been done on Mars.

* Mars is the closest planet to Earth, but how much do we know about it? Written by science author Steve Parker, this fact-packed book takes a look at the physical features of the planet and at the amazing exploration that has been done on Mars.

* Yellow/Band 3 books offer varied sentence structure and natural language

* Photographs of Mars taken from space on pages 14-15 help children recap and provide a wealth of speaking and listening opportunities.

* Text type: An information book

* Curriculum links: Science

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

This book has been graded for interest at 4-6 years. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading scheme has multiple levels. 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 2013 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Steve Parker is an experienced non-fiction children's writer who also wrote the Look at Your Body series. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. 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.