What's it like to compete in the world's largest sporting event? Find out all about the Olympic Games, when they began and how they have changed over time. Read about the different events and some of the amazing stories of how athletes have won their medals in this fascinating information book.

* Topaz/ Band 13 books offer longer and more demanding reads for children to investigate and evaluate.

* Text type: An infomation book.

* A useful chart on pages 46-47 compares Olympic events from the ancient games, the first modern games and the most recent games to help children discuss what they've read and think about the way the sporting event has changed and developed over time.

* Additional information retrieval devices such as a glossary and index can be evaluated for their usefulness as children develop critical reading skills.

* Curriculum links: Geography: Connecting ourselves to the world; Citizenship: Living in a diverse world.

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

This book features in the following series: Collins Big Cat, Topaz Series .

. 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 48 pages in this book. This book was published 2009 by HarperCollins Publishers .

John Foster is Britain's leading author in the field of Citizenship and PSHE. 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.