How does a yo-yo climb back up its string? Why does a boomerang come back to you? And how does a kaleidoscope work? These and other mind-bending questions are answered in this explanation text about how toys work.

* Gold/Band 9 fiction books offer developing readers literary language and stories with distinctive characters.

* Text type - An explanation text.

* A table on pages 20 and 21 summarises what makes each toy featured in the book work, for example, magnets, friction or gravity. The book includes a glossary and an index on pages 22 and 23. Both provide lots of opportunities to check comprehension and stimulate work outside the reading session.

*Curriculum links - Art and design: Investigate materials; Science: Forces and movement.

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 .

Gill Matthews is a literacy consultant and writer, and has been series editor for several major literary programmes (including Literacy World and Rigby Dimensions) and series consultant for publishers including Scholastic, Hodder & Stoughton, Franklin Watts and Evans. She was heavily involved in the development of the non-fiction element of the National Literacy Strategy for teachers, and is a leading advocate for the need for non-fiction in literacy teaching. 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.