This engaging information book explores life in the British seas through the eyes of real-life diver and professional photographer Arthur Kingdon. Vibrant and colourful photographs show the varied nature of life under the sea, looking at big sharks, shoals of small fish, jellyfish and extremely playful seals!

*Collins Big Cat Phonics Progress books are specifically designed for struggling readers, giving them age-appropriate texts that they can read, building their confidence and fostering positive attitudes towards reading. This title has a text level of Band 4 / Blue, which provides longer, repeated patterns with sequential events, and an interest level of Band 8 / Purple.

*Text type: A non-fiction recount

*On pages 14 to 15, photographs and labels of different things that can be found in the British seas help children to recap the information from the book and provide a wealth of speaking and listening opportunities.

*Curriculum links: Geography

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

This book has been graded for interest at Collins Stage 8. 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. 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 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. Kay Hiatt has held the posts of literacy coordinator, deputy head teacher and head teacher, registered Ofsted inspector and trainer for the EYFS stage.