Do you know how to turn a small, fat thing into a long, thin thing? It's easy - just take a bean and grow a beanstalk! This simple instruction text shows you exacly how to do it.

* Blue / Band 4 - A simple instruction text

* Text type - Non-fiction

* The focus phonemes in this book are ur (curl), al and ow (how).

* The flow chart on the final spread gives children the chance to recap and discuss the different stages of the process.

* Janice Vale also wrote Yellow 3 Rock Out.

* This book has been levelled for Reading Recovery.

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

. 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. 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 2006 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Joan Poulson is an experienced playwright, poet and anthologist. She compiled 'Pictures in my Mind' for the Hodder Wayland poetry list, 'Celebration' for UNICEF and 'Girls are like Diamonds' for OUP. Kelly Waldek did a graphic design degree (specialising in illustration) and has illustrated many works for Hodder Wayland, Belitha, Brilliant Books and BBC Education.