Spring is just around the corner…I hope! If you, like me, can’t wait to get hands in the soil and seeds in the ground, today’s Perfect Picture Book is just what you need to read!
Title: A Seed Grows
Written & Illustrated By: Antoinette Portis
Publisher/Date: Neal Porter Books/2022
Suitable for Ages: 3-6
Themes/Topics: sunflowers, seeds, life cycle; nonfiction; STEAM
Opening:
A seed falls
and settles into the soil
Brief Synopsis: The life cycle of a sunflower plant.
Links to Resources:
- Check out the activities on Portis’ website;
- Grow your own sunflowers;
- Try making prints with a celery stalk;
- Check out these sunflower crafts.
Why I Like this Book:
It’s brief. It’s to the point. And it’s beautiful!
With its 76 words and gel-printed, linocut, potato-stamped, and printed-with-a-celery-stalk vibrant illustrations, A Seed Grows shows the life cycle of a sunflower plant. The premise is simple. The story is entirely non-fiction, without a young child or any human in sight. Just a seed that germinates, a plant that grows and blossoms, and a bird that grabs a seed, then drops it, enabling the cycle to continue.
Kids love sunflowers with their sunshiny “faces” (my own kids always have). I think that kids can relate to the small seed becoming a tiny plant then stretching towards the sky and producing a large, round, face-like flower. Additionally, I think kids can relate to the tiny bird with its outsize role in the sunflower’s lifecycle.
Whether you read A Seed Grows at home, at school, or in the library, kids will love it, and they won’t even realize that they’re learning as they listen. Spoiler alert: don’t miss the top fold-out to view the full-grown sunflower.
A Note about Craft:
The text of A Seed Grows contains two sentences. Yep! You read that correctly: TWO sentences! Notably, the first sentence is rather lengthy. It doesn’t end until the final spread, with eight “ands” followed by other transition words. All of these transitions occur after a page turn. Despite a lack of commas, semi-colons, and periods, I had no trouble reading the text aloud, finding myself pausing naturally without these signals to break. I also discovered that the switch from “and” to “until” indicated a change in the action, a turning point. For writers trying to “make every word count”, Portis has provided a master class in A Seed Grows.
This Perfect Picture Book entry is being added to Susanna Hill’s Perfect Picture Book list. Check out the other great picture books featured there!
Wander, Ponder, Write 