When Sam and his family took a trip to the beach, they weren't expecting him to make a snappy new friend... This sweet story of friendship was written by nine-year-old Collins Big Cat Writing Competition winner Kipp Whysall and beautifully illustrated by Anni Axworthy.

* Blue/Band 4 books offer longer, repeated patterns with sequential events and integrated literary and natural language.

* Text type: A poem

* Curriculum links: Citizenship

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

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

This book has been graded for interest at 4-6 years. 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 16 pages in this book. This book was published 2013 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years.