What's the difference between a frog and a toad? This highly photographic non-fiction book explains the similarities and differences between these two amphibians, including their appearance, diet and behaviour.

* Yellow/Band 3 books offer varied sentence structure and natural language.

* Text type: A simple non-fiction book.

* Children can compare the similarities and differences of frogs and toad in the comparison pages on pages 14-15, providing plenty of discussion opportunities.

* Curriculum links: Science: Plants and animals.

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

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

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 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. This reading book uses the Synthetic phonics method. (This can also be referred to as 'blended phonics' or 'inductive phonics'). A phonics 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. In Synthetic Phonics, children are taught to sound and blend from the start of reading tuition. Children are taught a small group of letter sounds and then shown how these can be co-articulated to pronounce unfamiliar words. Other groups of letters are then taught and the children blend them in order to pronounce new words. The pronunciation of the word is discovered through sounding and blending, and spelling by mapping sounds to letters. Consonant blends that cannot be read by blending are explicitly taught.

There are 16 pages in this book. This book was published 2011 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Sue Barraclough was the editor of Playdays magazine and now works as a freelance writer and editor. She has worked on many books for younger children. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years.