A hungry man and his wife baked a small bun. But as soon as they put it on their plate, the bun jumped up and ran off. This lively version of the traditional story of the gingerbread man is by Martin Waddell.

* Blue / Band 4 - A

* Text type - Fiction

* The focus phoneme in this book is al (small).

* Use the storymap on the final spread to discuss the route the small bun took and the characters he met..

* Martin Waddell also wrote Red 2b The Mouse and the Monster; Yellow 3 Horse Up a Tree

* 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 Phonics .

. 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. 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 .

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. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years.