The useful thing to know about a life-cycles shelf is that half of these books are stories and half are diagrams, and your class needs to be told which one they are holding. A story shows a seed becoming a flower and asks a child to feel it; a diagram names the root and the shoot and asks a child to learn it. Both belong in the unit and they do different jobs. These seven are picked so you have one of each kind for every stage: The Tiny Seed opens the unit as a story your whole carpet can hear, From Seed to Plant and From Tadpole to Frog are the two you actually teach from, with labeled diagrams and a hands-on activity in the back of each, A Butterfly Is Patient and An Egg Is Quiet are the beautiful ones to leave on the table for a child to pore over, and Chickens Aren't the Only Ones is the one that breaks the assumption that a life cycle only means a frog or a butterfly. Hand each child the one that fits their reading and bring the class back together to talk. One book here is loved by everyone and teaches the science wrong, and you should know that before you plan around it: read the note on The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
The seven books answer one question, how does a living thing grow and change, and any one satisfies the whole idea on its own, so pick by the child in front of you. What makes it a unit rather than a pile is that the books split cleanly into two kinds, and the best hour you can spend with this shelf is teaching a class to tell them apart. The stories, The Tiny Seed and The Very Hungry Caterpillar, follow one creature and ask a child to care what happens to it. The diagrams, From Seed to Plant and From Tadpole to Frog, stop the action and name the parts. The two Aston and Long books, A Butterfly Is Patient and An Egg Is Quiet, sit between the kinds, spare enough to read aloud and detailed enough to study, painted like natural history and meant to be lingered over rather than read straight through. And Chickens Aren't the Only Ones is the odd useful one that widens the frame, a rhyming survey of every animal that lays an egg, so a class stops thinking eggs mean chickens or that a life cycle only ever means a frog. Here is how they earn their places. The Tiny Seed opens the unit because it is the story every child can enter and it plants the whole idea, a seed travels, sprouts, grows, and scatters seeds of its own, before anyone opens a diagram. From Seed to Plant and From Tadpole to Frog are the two you teach from: labeled, sequential, and each with a real activity in the back, a bean in a jar for one and simple pond work for the other, so the lesson is ready-made. A Butterfly Is Patient and An Egg Is Quiet are the ones to set on a table and let a child fall into. And then there is the caterpillar. The Very Hungry Caterpillar is beloved and belongs in the room, but it is not a science book and using it as one teaches an error. It is a counting and days-of-the-week book; the caterpillar eats birthday cake and salami and lollipops, which no real caterpillar does; and it spins a cocoon, when a butterfly forms a chrysalis. Eric Carle knew this and defended the book as a fantasy, which is exactly right, so read it for joy and for counting and teach the actual metamorphosis from A Butterfly Is Patient, which names the chrysalis correctly. Told plainly to a class of eight-year-olds, that the most famous caterpillar book gets the science wrong on purpose, it becomes the sharpest thing on this shelf about how a story and a science book are different animals.