Hector the Hippo wants to play the cello more than anything else in the world. But who in the jungle will teach him? Most of the other animals laugh at the idea. Finally Hector meets a musician who can help him, a lyrebird. He practices everyday until he has a chance to play at a grand concert in front of all the other animals.

* Purple/ Band 8 books offer developing readers literary language, with some challenging vocabulary.

* Text type - A story by a significant author.

* A storyboard on pages 22 and 23 summarises the story in eight illustrations providing an opportunity to recap the key events.

* Curriculum links - Music: Exploring sounds, Classroom instruments, Combining sounds to make music; Science: Animals; ICT: Using text and tables to develop ideas.

* 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 2005 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Ros Asquith has worked as a photographer and a theatre critic as well as a cartoonist. 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.