The desert is too hot to stand still, so Hoppit and his friends keep moving. As more and more animals join, who knows where they're going to end up! It's a big surprise for everyone except the snake and eagle, who try to warn them what's ahead...Join in the rhythm and rhyme of the animal parade in this poem, written and illustrated by Steve Webb.

* Green/Band 5 books offer early readers patterned language and varied characters

* Text type: A poem

* Children can follow the animal parade through the desert in the map of their journey on pages 14 and 15.

* Curriculum links: Science: Habitats; Geography: Weather around the world; Music: Feel the pulse

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 2012 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Steve Webb is the author Tanka Tanka Skunk. He currently lives in the Peak District with his three children. Ben Mantle studied animation at Surrey Institute of Art and Design and was Head of Animation at a Brighton-based studio before becoming a freelance illustrator and animator.