Bert's Band like to play as they march down the street. When they win the cup, they arrive back at their home town at midnight, and very carefully remove their shoes and socks so as not to disturb the townsfolk as they march down the street - playing at full belt! This lively text is ideal to read aloud, with lots of opportunities to join in.

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

* Text type - A humorous story.

* At the end of the story is a poster by the bandstand in the park, advertising Bert's band, which is an ideal cue for further discussion and supports writing activities outside the reading session.

* Curriculum links - Science: sounds and hearing; Citizenship: taking part.

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 16 pages in this book. This book was published 2012 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Tim Archbold was born in Northumberland and lives in the Scottish Borders. He has written and illustrated over 100 books for children, including Bagpipes, Beasties and Bogles (2012). Martin Waddell is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest living writers of books for children. He has won many awards for his work, including the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2004. 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.