Poor Rat! No one wants to be his friend. But when the other animals see how sad he is, they all try to make him feel better. This gentle rhyming story is written and illustrated by Emma Chichester Clark.

* Red / Band 2B - A rhyming story

* Text type - Fiction

* The focus phonemes in this book are qu, th (them) and ch. Other phonemes practised are sh, th (thin), ng, ee, z, w, oo (look), ie (lie) and y.

* A story plan on the final spread allows children the opportunity to recap and discuss the story.

* This story is paired with the non-fiction recount on a similar theme: Red 2B Feelings by Monica Hughes.

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

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

This book is at the early years level of the National Curriculum. The National Curriculum sets out the programmes of study and attainment targets for all subjects at all 4 key stages. Early years refers to the standards that school and childcare providers must meet for the learning, development and care of children from birth to 5. Each National Curriculum level is divided into sub-levels, where Level C means that a child is working at the lower end of the level, Level B they is working comfortably at that level, and Level A means that they is working at the top end of the level. The Government has suggested a child should achieve the following levels by the end of each school year: (i) Level 1b by end Year 1, Level 2a-c by end Year 2, Level 2a-3b by end Year 3, Level 3 by the end Year 4, Level 3b-4c by the end Year 5, Level 4 by the end Year 6. 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. 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. Emma Chichester Clark studied at Chelsea School of Art and then the Royal College WHere she was taught by Quentin Blake. She won the Mother Goose Award in 1988 for Listen to This.