Bored of spending all your holidays on Mars? Now you can travel further off the beaten astral plane with this fact-packed guide.

* Sapphire/Band 16 books offer longer reads to develop children's sustained engagement with texts and are more complex syntactically.

* A travel guide to all the planets in the solar system on pages 54 and 55 makes it easy for children to recap what the key facts they've learnt.

* Text type: A non-chronological report.

* Curriculum links: Science; Geography; Citizenship.

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

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

. 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 56 pages in this book. This is a guide book. This book was published 2008 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Giles Sparrow is an author specializing in astronomy and physics. He's written about everything from space technology to the history of science. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years.