Inspired by the tale of the Princess and the Pea, well-known children's author Vivian French tells the story of Princess Sue who seeks a prince using a royal parsnip test!

* Inspired by the tale of the Princess and the Pea, well-known children's author Vivian French tells the story of Princess Sue who seeks a prince using a royal parsnip test!

* Blue/Band 4 books offer longer, repeated patterns with sequential events and integrated literary and natural language.

* Children can recap the stages that Sue had to go through to find her prince using the story map on pages 14-15.

* Text type: A retelling of a traditional tale

* Curriculum links: Literacy

This book is part of a book series called Collins Big Cat .

This book has been graded for interest at 4-6 years. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading scheme has multiple levels. 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 2013 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Emma Block is a successful freelance illustrator who uses watercolors in a fresh and modern way and isn't afraid to break the rules. Her watercolor and gouache paintings have gained her more than 40, 000 followers on Instagram (@emmablockillustration) and she has become a reliable source of online watercolor advice. As well as inspiring budding artists all over the world online she teaches regular sellout watercolor classes in London, where she also lives. Vivian French is a well-known author who has written over 150 books for children. 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.