Imaginative, clever and often humorous, this beautifully illustrated poetry collection by Valerie Bloom is inspired by the strange and wonderful creatures of the natural world.

* Ruby/Band 14 books give increasing opportunities for children to develop their skills of inference and deduction.

* Text type: A poetry book

* Curriculum links: Citizenship

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 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 48 pages in this book. This book was published 2013 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Valerie Bloom was born in Jamaica and came to England in 1979. One of the UK's finest poets for children, she has performed extensively in both Britain and the Caribbean in schools, universities and theatres. A brilliant performance poet, Valerie has also written a novel, Surprising Joy, and two picture books. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Matt Robertson graduated with a Masters in Children's Book Illustration from the Cambridge School of Art in 2014 and in 2016 he was shortlisted for the Waterstones Book Prize (illustrated category). He lives and works in Norwich, UK.