The renowned children's writer Michael Morpurgo has written this vivid account of a child's stay at a farm, told in the form of letters home and illustrated with photographs of animals and children on location at the farm. Humorous and engaging, it conveys the fun and excitement of working closely with animals.

* Turquoise/ Band 7 books offer literay language and extended descriptions, with longer sentences and a wide range of unfamiliar terms.

* Text type - A recount of a visit.

* There is a timetable of the week's events on page 22 and an index on page 23 to help children recount the story.

* Curriculum links -Geography: Plants and animals in the local environment; Citizenship: Animals and us.

* 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 .

Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Michael Morpurgo has brought together poems by writers as diverse as Spike Milligan and Stevie Smith, John Lennon and Jo Shapcott. 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.