This non-fiction book explores what it was like to live through the First World War, from life in the trenches and the weapons used on the battlefield, to the war effort at home and the role that children played. This title has been written in conjunction with the Imperial War Museum and includes fascinating photographs from their archives.

* Collins Big Cat Progress books are specifically designed for children at Key Stage 2 who have a Key Stage 1 reading level, giving them age-appropriate texts that they can read, building their confidence and fostering positive attitudes towards reading.

* Text type: A non-fiction recount

* Curriculum links:

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

This book is at the following key stages: Key Stage 1, Key Stage 2 . A key stage is any of the fixed stages into which the national curriculum is divided, each having its own prescribed course of study. At the end of each stage, pupils are required to complete standard assessment tasks. KS1 covers school years 1 and 2, and ages 5-7 years. KS2 covers school years 4, 5 and 6, and ages 8-11 years. This book is aimed at children in primary school.

This book has been graded for interest at Collins Stage 16. 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 32 pages in this book. This book was published 2014 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Jillian Powell is an experienced writer of children's fiction and non-fiction. 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.