Joe has birthday money to spend, and decides a cute dog he's seen in a pet shop window is the perfect purchase. For some reason, though, the pet shop owner is determined not to sell that particular dog ... This wonderful story was written by Carnegie award-winning author David Almond, and brought to life with the illustrations of Ayesha Lopez.

* Collins Big Cat Progress books are specifically designed for children at Key Stage 2 who have a Key Stage 1 reading level, giving them age-appropriate texts that they can read, building their confidence and fostering positive attitudes towards reading.

* Text type: A humorous story

* Curriculum links: Citizenship

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

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

This book is at the following key stages: Key Stage 1, Key Stage 2 . A key stage is any of the fixed stages into which the national curriculum is divided, each having its own prescribed course of study. At the end of each stage, pupils are required to complete standard assessment tasks. KS1 covers school years 1 and 2, and ages 5-7 years. KS2 covers school years 4, 5 and 6, and ages 8-11 years.

This book has been graded for interest at Collins Stage 12. 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.

There are 24 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. David Almond has written many award-winning books including 'The Fire-Eaters', 'Skellig' and 'Kit's Wilderness'. He has won the Gold Smarties Award and the Carnegie Medal.