Arthur the donkey is having a party - but he wants it to be fantastic. So fantastic, that only fantastic guests can come! But when none of his friends qualify to go on the guest list, he changes his mind - and everyone has lots of fun.

* Orange/ Band 6 books offer varied text and characters, with action sustained over several pages.

* Text type - A humorous story.

* An invitation and reply for Arthur's party on pp22-23 offer a great opportunity to extend the story and link to children's writing.

* Curriculum links - Citizenship: Choices living in a diverse world.

* This story is paired with a non-fiction book on the same theme: How to Make Pop-up Cards by Monica Hughes.

* 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 aimed at children in primary school. 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 2005 by HarperCollins Publishers .

This is Joseph Theobald's first book. He trained at Falmouth Art College, and is currently living and helping build a boat in Spain. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. 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.