The transformative life cycle of a sunflower plays out in this bold read-aloud by Sibert honoree Antoinette Portis.

“A seed falls,
And settles into the ground,
And the Sun shines,
And the rain comes down,
And the seed grows…”

To understand how a seed becomes a sunflower, you have to peek beneath the soil and wait patiently as winding roots grow, a stalk inches out of the earth, and new seeds emerge among blooming petals.

With evocative and lively illustrations, A Seed Grows offers a close-up view of each step of this process and the ways in which flowers and seeds depend on other creatures, with a striking fold-out spread of a full-grown sunflower and additional material at the back of the book explaining the science of plant life cycles.

Antoinette Portis is the author of A New Green Day, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and NCTE Notable Book in Poetry, as well as the Sibert Honor winning Hey, Water!

Details

• Hard cover 

• Pages: 40

• Age Range: 3-6 years

• ISBN: 9780823448920

Praise

★ "Clear, engaging, beautiful, and perfectly pitched to its young audience—simply brilliant."—The Horn Book, Starred Review

★ "Employing spare language and sunny, stippled multimedia spreads that belie their quiet complexity, Portis gracefully traces a sunflower’s cycle from seed to sprout to plant—and back again. . . It’s a volume almost as jam-packed as a seed itself."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"Youngsters will feel a sense of awe as they witness the magic of a seed’s first tender shoot and the symbiosis of nature. . . . [A] useful primer on one of nature’s miraculous cycles."—Kirkus Reviews

"An appealing addition to the STEM shelf. . . ."—Booklist