This comical story is a patterned, counting text about a band of pirates searching for treasure. One-by-one, they get into trouble and make a hasty retreat back to the pirate ship. Helpful vignettes of the pirates at the top of each page help children count how many pirates are left.

* Red B/ Band 2B books offer simple but varied text with familiar objects and actions, combined with simple story development and a satisfying conclusion.

* Text type - A story with predictable structure and patterned language

* The map on pages 14 and 15 shows the trail the pirates take from their ship to the treasure cave and back again, and can be used to help recap and retell the story.

* Paul Shipton is also the author of Collins Big Cat titles See-saw, Get the Fruit! and The Robot.

* 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 16 pages in this book. This book was published 2005 by HarperCollins Publishers .

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. 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. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Joan Poulson is an experienced playwright, poet and anthologist. She compiled 'Pictures in my Mind' for the Hodder Wayland poetry list, 'Celebration' for UNICEF and 'Girls are like Diamonds' for OUP. Kelly Waldek did a graphic design degree (specialising in illustration) and has illustrated many works for Hodder Wayland, Belitha, Brilliant Books and BBC Education.