Sam the big, bad cat isn't feeling well. Tom wants to take him to the vet. Sam doesn't want to go, and finds a variety of hiding places to escape. Tom pursues him, getting more and more bedraggled in the process. Finally Tom goes to bed, leaving Sam - who is feeling much better - to enjoy a snack.

* Yellow level/ Band 3 books offer early readers varied sentence structure and natural language.

* Text type - A story with a familiar setting.

* A storyboard on pages 14 and 15 reveals all of Sam's hiding places in a pictorial summary of the day, providing the opportunity to recap the story.

* Curriculum links - Citizenship: animals and us.

* 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 16 pages in this book. This book was published 2005 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Sheila Bird writes in a little blue shed in her garden in Surrey. Most of her story ideas come to her whilst walking in the neighbouring woods and fields. Sheila's favourite hobby is reading other people's stories. This is her first title for Caterpillar Books. Corinne Bittler studied at the School of Applied Arts in Paris. She loves illustrating animals and funny little characters and adding lots of colours and texture to her artwork. This is her first title for Caterpillar Books. Trish Phillips was born in Hong Kong but has lived most of her life in South East England. She studied for a BA in Graphic Design at Camberwell College and also studied illustration at Chelsea College of Art. Trish lives with her family in Surrey. 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.