This work offers a further 24 "Treetops" titles in "Oxford Reading Tree's" series of fiction with built-in progression for pupils aged 7 to 11. Specially written for children who need the support of carefully monitored language levels, the stories are accessible, motivating, and humorous. The series is organized into Oxford Reading Tree stages (from Stage 10 to Stage 14), with each stage introducing more complex narrative forms, extended reading vocabulary, and more text per page. Each stage is supported by the "Teacher's Guide", which offers guidance on using "Treetops" to assess children's reading ability, and includes a variety of activities, many on photocopiable sheets.

 

This book features in the following series: Oxford Reading Tree, Treetops .

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 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 56 pages in this book. This book was published 1996 by Oxford University Press .

Judy Brown is an illustrator of picture books and younger fiction. This is her first novel and begins a series featuring Portia. Judy is married with two children and lives in South London. Paul Shipton is an award-winning children's author. He published his first children's book in 1991, (Zargon Zoo). He lives and works in Wisconsin, USA.