Long ago, the king of Denmark built a huge hall for feasts, and he called it Heorot. But the noise from the hall woke a sleeping monster in the nearby swamp - Grendel. Could the brave warrior Beowulf save Denmark's people and fight the monster? This retelling of the Old English tale was written by award-winning author Anita Ganeri.

* Collins Big Cat Progress books are specifically designed for children at Key Stage 2 who have a Key Stage 1 reading level, giving them age-appropriate texts that they can read, building their confidence and fostering positive attitudes towards reading.

* Text type: A retelling of a folk tale

* Curriculum links: History; Citizenship

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

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

This book is at the following key stages: Key Stage 1, Key Stage 2 . A key stage is any of the fixed stages into which the national curriculum is divided, each having its own prescribed course of study. At the end of each stage, pupils are required to complete standard assessment tasks. KS1 covers school years 1 and 2, and ages 5-7 years. KS2 covers school years 4, 5 and 6, and ages 8-11 years.

This book has been graded for interest at Collins Stage 14. 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 2013 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Anita Ganeri is an award-winning author of children's books, specializing in geography. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years.