Nick Butterworth's well known and much loved character Percy the Park Keeper stars in this beautifully told story for early readers. When Percy's cap, scarf and gloves go missing, they end up being used by some mischevious mice to decorate a snowman!

* Yellow/ Band 3 books offer varied sentence structure and natural language.

* Text type - A story with a familiar setting.

* A storyboard on pages 14 and 15 provide children with an opportunity to retell the story in their own words.

* Curriculum links - Geography: our local area; citizenship: animals and us.

* This story is one of three books by Nick Butterworth in the Collins Big Cat reading programme.

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 .

Nick Butterworth was born in Kingsbury, North London in 1946, but moved to Romford in Essex with his parents at the age of three. They moved to run a sweet shop, so Nick found himself fulfilling every child's sugar-coated dream of growing up right inside the proverbial chocolate factory. Having intended to go to art college after leaving school, Nick decided to take a job as a typographic designer in the printing department of the National Children's Home at the last minute instead. He went on to work for several major London design consultancies before moving into freelance graphics. He has also worked as a television presenter on the TV-AM children's programme Rub-a-Dub-Tub and produced a regular illustrated story called Upney Junction for the Sunday Express magazine. At present, Nick concentrates on writing and illustrating his phenomenally successful children's books. Percy The Park Keeper first came to life in One Snowy Night in 1989, which The Sunday Times described as, 'a tremendous and well-deserved success' and The Independent called, 'a heart warming bedtime tale. ' It wasn't just the reviewers who loved Percy and the world of his park - children, parents and teachers alike fell in love with the kind hearted park keeper. More Percy adventures followed and the range now includes 6 hardback books, paperbacks, audio tapes (read by Richard Briers) and a range of activity books. The latest Percy book, Percy's Bumpy Ride was published in October 1999. 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.