`I want a pet! I want a pet! I hope I like the pet I get!'
When a boy goes to the Strange Pet Shop to find a pet, there's no knowing what he'll find there. He is very particular, and nothing at the Strange Pet Shop suits him until, at last the perfect pet comes bounding through the door!

* Green/ Band 5 books offer early readers patterned language and varied characters.

* Text type - A poem with predictable structure and patterned language.

* At the end of the story is a poster advertising the Strange Pet Shop, which is ideal for further discussion and supporting further work outside the reading session.

* Curriculum links - Citizenship: Animals and us.

* This book has been levelled for Reading Recovery.

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 .

Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Sarah Horne trained as an Illustrator at Falmouth College of Arts. She has worked in Illustration for Editorial, Advertising and Children's Books for the past three years. Kaye Umansky is very well known for her PONGWIFFY stories (Puffin) and other 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.