Young Hercules is challenged by the King to carry out seven labours - no problem, although the King is less impressed when he brings back the evidence and stinks out the palace.

* Lime/Band 11 books have longer sentence structures and a greater use of literary language.

* Text type - A playscript of a traditional tale.

* Pages 30 and 31 feature a `wanted poster' for a your man answering to Hercules description, providing a great starting point for lots of speaking, listening and writing activities.

* Curriculum links - Citizenship: Taking part, Living in a diverse world, Animals and us.

* This book has been levelled for Reading Recovery.

* 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 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 32 pages in this book. This book was published 2005 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Chris Mould is an established illustrator and has sold internationally. He is married with two children and lives in Yorkshire. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. DIANE REDMOND is the author of more than 45 books for young readers - including Here We Go! For the Corgi Yearling list - as well as a number of plays and TV scripts. She has three children. Author lives- Cambridge Jonathan was born in 1965, the son of a rig fitter and a primary school teacher. He first developed his skills as a writer and illustrator while studying architecture, illustrating poems and lyrics that he had written. After leaving college, he worked as an architect for several years, before pursuing a career in children's books. In addition to writing books such as Bringing Down the Moon, and Ruby Flew Too, he also paper-engineers pop-up books.