By Wendy Pfeffer
The clear, step-by-step account of how a jelly-covered egg in a pond becomes a swimming tadpole and then a frog that climbs out onto land.
This is the frog cycle laid out plainly, one stage at a time. In spring a mother frog lays her eggs in a pond and they float in a jelly clump. The eggs hatch into tadpoles that breathe underwater with gills and swim about like little fish. Then the change comes, slowly: back legs push out, then front legs, the tail shrinks away, the gills turn into lungs, and at last a small frog climbs out of the water onto the bank, ready to start the whole thing again next spring. Holly Keller's clean illustrations pair with short, doable sentences, and there are simple find-out-more activities at the back.
After a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, a tadpole becoming a frog is the most astonishing thing a young science-lover can be handed, and this is the plain version that shows the real steps instead of skipping to the end. It names each stage and shows it, so a child comes away knowing the actual order, gills before lungs, tail last, rather than a general sense that a frog used to be something else. It reads aloud easily and works as a first solo nonfiction book, and the activities in the back give a curious child something to go and do.