A humorous story with simple, repetitive text about two little monsters painting spots, stripes, squares, zigzags and triangles. But what are they painting? Finally the reader discovers that the little monsters have actually been painting the shapes on their sleeping mum!

* Pink B/ Band 1B books offer emergent readers simple, predictable text with familiar objects and actions.

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

* Pages 14 and 15 feature the fully painted mum-monster, with smaller pictures of the little monsters to remind children of the shapes painted.

* This book has been levelled for Reading Recovery.

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

. 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 2007 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Tasha Pym is the author of Blot and Og's Monster Party, illustrated by Charles Fuge (Gullane's Children's Books) and Harry Fly, Colour Bears and Super Sculptures (Collins Education). Joel Stewart grew up in Sheffield after spending his earliest years in a commune in the wilds somewhere near Barnsley. He obtained a first class Honours degree in illustration from Falmouth College of Arts and was already working on his first picture book, The Adventures of a Nose, before he graduated. He plays the banjo and button accordion and likes to draw while watching films. Other titles illustrated by Joel Stewart include The Magic Paintbrush (Macmillan), Jabberwocky (Walker Books), Tales of Hans Christian Andersen (Walker Books) and Me and My Mammoth (Macmillan). Olivia Villet sent her work to Bloomsbury unsolicited in a very beautifully painted envelope. From that first contact Chester's Big Surprise was developed. Olivia is already working on another book for Bloomsbury Children's Books. Olivia Villet studied at art college in South Africa where she was born and brought up. She is currently staying in London, hoping to develop her career as an illustrator. 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.