Read the fantasy story by Julia Donaldson about a mermaid and a greedy octopus, filled with colourful illustrations.

* Blue/ Band 4 books offer longer, repeated patterns with sequential events and integrated literary and natural language.

* Text type - A fantasy story.

* The illustrations on pages 14 and 15 allow children to retell the story in their own words.

* Curriculum links - Art: Mother nature, designer; Citizenship: Choices

* 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 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.

There are 16 pages in this book. This book was published 2006 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Julia Donaldson is a former Children's Laureate and the author of the internationally bestselling book The Gruffalo, as well as numerous other popular titles. 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.