At the dawn of time, the Maker is having problems with the animals he makes. His beaver and his ants are too big, his moose is the same size as a mouse and his elephant can hide behind a blade of grass! Maker is forced to think again about the original plans for the animals, adjusting their size to the way they are today.

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

* Text type - A story by a significant author.

* An illustrated diagram on pages 30 and 31 reminds the reader of how the animals looked before and after the maker finished creating them, an ideal cue for children to retell the story in their own words.

* Curriculum links - Citizenship: Choices; Science: Plants and animals in the local environment, variation.

* 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 .

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. Ita Daly is an acclaimed Irish novelist. Her short stories have appeared in Irish, British and US magazines and anthologies, and she has won an Irish Times short story competition as well as two Hennessy Literary Awards. Bee Willey is a well-known artist, who has illustrated many best-selling treasuries and books of fairy tales. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Geraldine McCaughrean is the author of The Odyssey and other titles in the acclaimed Oxford Illustrated Classics series.