Far, far away, in deep, dark space, was a star. A tiny twinkle. But it was Star Boy's home. Star Boy lived there all alone, with only his robot, Ace, for company. And although Ace was fun to play with, he was just a robot. For his birthday, all Star Boy wanted was a surprise - but how could a robot think of a surprise?

* This deceptively simple science fiction story explores ideas of friendship and understanding.

* Text type - A fantasy story.

* Pictures taken through the Space Girl's viewer are featured on pages 22 and 23, showing views from her rocket and snap shots of the birthday party providing lots of speaking and listening opportunities.

* Curriculum links - Citizenship: Taking part, Developing skills of communication and participation.

* This story is paired with a non-fiction book on a similar theme: Let's go to Mars by Janice Marriott.

* 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 24 pages in this book. This book was published 2004 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. 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.