An information book about the celebrated historical and fictional characters Cleopatra, Boudica, King Arthur, Robin Hood, the Pied Piper, Pocahontas, Blackbeard, Dracula and Tarzan. The book investigates which of them really existed, and which are based on legend.

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

* Text type - An information book.

* An index and a glossary are included on pages 22 and 23 to aid comprehension.

* Curriculum links - History: Why do we remember great people? How do we know about great events?

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 .

Scoular Anderson is a popular author/illustrator whose previous books on our list include the very successful MY FIRST JOKE BOOK. He lives in Argyll, Scotland. 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.