Oxford Reading Tree Songbirds Phonics Stories: More Stage 5 (6 Book Set) Award-winning author by Julia Donaldson (author) (UK edition)

The UK’s most successful reading scheme, Oxford Reading Tree, teams up with star author Julia Donaldson in this brilliant phonics series, full of wonderful stories which practise the basic sounds that make up words. Songbirds builds on children’s phonic knowledge by letting them segment, blend and match common letter sounds and letter blends in brilliant stories written with the author’s hallmark energy and wit. All the stories support the school curriculum for literacy, providing fully decodeable texts that build on children’s phonic knowledge as they work through a total of 36 books spread over six stages.

This set of six Stage Five books introduces more common spelling patterns of long vowel sounds, plus some soft sounds. It includes comprehensive teachers’ notes.

“A pedigree scheme worth every penny for helping children get to grips with words, sounds and spelling patterns… Julia Donaldson has described Songbirds as her ‘proudest achievement’ and it is easy to see why.” John Dabell, Teach Primary

Product Details

Catalogue number

3164 in Rewards Catalogue 2026/27 and 3164 in Rewards Catalogue 2025/26

Format

Paperback

ISBN

9780198388623

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Date published

July 5th, 2012

Other details

6 pages

Condition

New

UK edition

Author/Illustrator

Julia Donaldson

Julia Donaldson is author of many of today’s best-loved picture books including The Gruffalo and Stick Man. Best known for her collaborations with Axel Scheffler, each of these vivid rhyming stories is a triumph of imagination. She was also the Children’s Laureate 2011-2013.

More about Julia: "I grew up in a tall Victorian London house with my parents, grandmother, aunt, uncle, younger sister Mary and cat Geoffrey (who was really a prince in disguise. Mary and I would argue about which of us would marry him).

Mary and I were always creating imaginary characters and mimicking real ones, and I used to write shows and choreograph ballets for us.

I studied Drama and French at Bristol University, where I met Malcolm, a guitar-playing medic to whom I’m now married.

Before Malcolm and I had our three sons we used to go busking together and I would write special songs for each country; the best one was in Italian about pasta.

The busking led to a career in singing and songwriting, mainly for children’s television.

One of my television songs, A Squash and a Squeeze, was made into a book in 1993, with illustrations by the wonderful Axel Scheffler. It was great to hold the book in my hand without it vanishing in the air the way the songs did. This prompted me to unearth some plays I’d written for a school reading group, and since then I’ve had 20 plays published.

My real breakthrough was The Gruffalo, again illustrated by Axel. We work separately – he’s in London and I’m in Glasgow – but he sends me letters with lovely funny pictures on the envelopes.

My novel The Giants and the Joneses is going to be made into a film by the same team who made the Harry Potter movies, and I have written three books of stories about the anarchic Princess Mirror-Belle who appears from the mirror and disrupts the life of an otherwise ordinary eight-year-old.

When I’m not writing I am often performing, at book festivals and in theatres. I really enjoy getting the children in the audience to help me act out the stories and sing the songs."