By Gail Gibbons
A clear, labeled account of how a flower becomes a seed and a seed grows into a plant, with a grow-a-bean experiment at the back.
This is a straight explanation of where a plant comes from and where it goes next. Gail Gibbons follows the whole loop. A flower gets pollinated by bees, other insects, birds, or the wind. The flower then makes seeds. The seeds scatter on the wind, on water, and by catching a ride on an animal's fur. A seed that lands in a good spot splits open, pushes a root down and a shoot up, and grows into a plant that flowers and makes seeds of its own. Each step comes with a labeled diagram, so your child can see the parts and read their names. The back of the book has a simple project for sprouting a bean in a jar, so they can watch a real root and stem do what the pages describe.
It answers the how that a story leaves out. A picture book like The Tiny Seed shows a seed growing; Gibbons names the parts and shows the mechanism, so a child who has wondered how a seed knows which way to send its root gets a plain answer. The diagrams are big and clean, which means it reads aloud fine to a five-year-old and also works as a look-it-up book for a new reader doing a school project. And the bean experiment turns the whole thing into something to do with a jar on the windowsill, not only read about.