'Ted's Shed' is one of 12 books I bought as a set aimed at young readers. I bought them a couple of years ago for me to read to my two boys as I had seen one of the books in the set at the library and the kids had really loved it. So when I saw 12 books for £10 in the book people catalogue, with a RRP of nearly £60 for the set, or £4.99 per individual book, I could not resist the bargain.

The set of books is based around animals with pretty unimaginative names like Fat Cat, Big Pig, Hen, Sam Sheep and Ted. The books support synthetic phonics learning, and are written in a rhyming style which is fun and engaging to small children. The book itself is quite long, and although my eldest son has been learning to read for about 9 months now from nursery and school, he is perhaps only just now getting to the stage where he can read these more himself. Up to now it has been me reading to them, with the boys joining in if they remember the words as we go along.

I would say really, a 5-6 year old may be able to read it to themselves, younger kids can enjoy it quite adequately if you read it to them. Older kids might see it as a bit babyish.

There are 16 pages, featuring a large illustration with one or two sentences around the pictures. They tell the story of Ted, who likes red. Today, Ted confuses all of his friends by moving his bed into his shed, and starting to do some DIY. Ted's friends have to watch him till the end to work out what he is doing, as does the reader. The pages are set out in a lovely appealing manner. Some pages have flaps with part of the text under the flap. When the boys were younger (2ish) they could get a bit eager about going on with the story and in some of the set of books, these flaps have torn. The paper is a bit thin for young toddlers and how rough they can be.

I find it takes about ten minutes to go through the book. The pictures relate nicely to the story, but are not quite as winning as in other books we own. Not lots of extra things in them to notice. This makes a nice bedtime story, with a bit of early learning thrown in which my two have always had too much fun to notice. I really like the series.