Fat Cat - Sue Graves

The series of books is 'designed to help the development of literacy skills in children learning to read and spell three and sometimes 4 letter words' or as I call them CVC words.

This book is one of 5 books in an excellent series of books called 'Fun with Phonics'.

- The story -

Very simply, Pat has a fat cat who sleeps all day on his mat. One day Pat spies a rat on her hat and demands that her fat cat does something about it!

Too fat and lazy to move, the cat just 'sat and sat' so it was up to Pat to chase the rat with a bat! Unfortunately Pat trips and lands on her cat who becomes a 'flat cat!'

So as you can see, the story is full of rhyming phonetic words.

- Style, Format and Educational Values -

This is quite a large book and is unusual in it's layout. Half of it contains the book part, the other half (which is forms the back, thicker card) shows the 8 main CVC rhyming words from the story alongside pictures of the items / things. At the bottom of this section there is a wheel turning with a large 'at' shown. As the wheel is turned the word can be changed to show words such as cat, fat, mat, hat, flat etc... In other words it's an interactive letter wheel!

The text is very large and simple enough for emergent readers to sound out the 3 letter words or join in from memory with the other words.

There are quite a few speech bubbles used, a good introduction to speech bubbles.

This book is ideal for any child who is ready for sounding out CVC words (consonant - vowel - consonant) but it can also be enjoyed by pre-readers.

It is a great educational resource:

• encourages rhyme recognition.
• identify onset and rime of 3 o 4 letter words.
• Sounding out skills can be encouraged.
• Develops early reading skills.

To name but a few!

- Illustrations -

The characters in the drawings are very large which I hope you can tell from the photos.

The drawings are bold, simple and very colourful and have a humorous element which children appreciate.

- Price -

ISBN: 1-902367-11-1
This cost me £3.50.

- Other Books by Sue Graves -

• Busy Week
• Miss Muffet and the spider
• Oh George!
• Fizz Whiz
• Get up Tim

- My verdict -

This is a good book with great educational values. A simple story line which appeals to children because of the 'funny' elements.
It is however best read on a one to one basis as if it is read to a large group, they don't all get a turn of making the words on the interactive wheel.

Other books in this series:

• Jen the Hen
• Posy the Pig
• Dog in the fog
• Baby bug