Do you look forward to the annual cheese-rolling? Or have you taken part in a dragonboat race? Perhaps you have danced in the street as part of a big street carnival. All around the world people take part in traditions that might seem unusual, but are great fun for everyone who joins in! Find out about all these and more in this information book.

*Purple/ Band 8 books offer developing readers literary language, with some challenging vocabulary.

* Text type - Non-chronological report.

* An index is shown on page 21, and a labelled map of the world on pages 22 and 23 showing where the traditions featured in the book originate, an ideal cue for further discussion.

* Curriculum links - Citizenship: Developing good relationships and respecting the differences between people; Geography: Where in the world is Barnaby bear?, Passport to the world.

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 2012 by HarperCollins Publishers .

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.