A Seed Grows

by Antoinette Portis

Overview

From a tiny seed to a huge, fold-out bloom, the transformative life cycle of a sunflower plays out in this bold read-aloud.

A Sibert Honor Book!
A Theodor Seuss Geisel Honor Book!

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.

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

Leading up to a striking fold-out spread of a full-grown sunflower, the lively, bold illustrations in A Seed Grows offer a close-up view of each step of the growth cycle.

Additional material in the back of the book explains the science of plant life cycles, and goes into more detail on the ways in which flowers and seeds depend on other creatures.

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!

An American Library Association Notable Children's Book
A CALIBA Golden Poppy Award Finalist
A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection
A Horn Book Fanfare Title

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823448920
Publisher:	Holiday House
Publication date:	06/21/2022
Pages:	40
Sales rank:	71,222
Product dimensions:	9.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.30(d)
Age Range:	3 - 6 Years

About the Author

Antoinette Portis is the author of many inventive books for children, including Not a Box, a New York Times Best Illustrated Book and a Geisel Honor Book and the Sibert Honor book Hey, Water!, which received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, and School Library Journal, who said "This simple introduction to water is an ideal read-aloud for the youngest scientists". Other titles include A New Green Day which was a Junior Library Guild selection and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, as well as the ALA Notable Books Wait and Now. A recipient of the Prestigious Sendak Fellowship, she lives in Southern California. Visit her at Antoinetteportis.com

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/28/2022

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. On each page, a term on the verso corresponds in hue with an image on the recto, focusing the reader’s attention on a single visual component. The word seed, for example, written in black, attends the arrival of a striped black sunflower shell at right (“A seed falls”). A page turn later, a brown-hued soil faces its referent, in which the seed nestles. And the font size of a bright green grows enlarges over several spreads as the seedling does the same. But the pages offer much more than an experiential play-by-play for youngest readers. In addition to incorporating mention of the seedling’s early needs (soil, sun, rain) and maturation phases (bud, flower, seed), text and image hint at the plant’s external effects (for those who “nest in the leaves// in the tops of trees”)—and, poignantly, its place as participant in the natural world. It’s a volume almost as jam-packed as a seed itself. Contextualizing back matter concludes. Ages 3–6. (June)

Publishers Weekly

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

★  "Like tissue paper held up to a sunny window, Portis's pictures have the glow of stained glass, offering texture and inviting readers to come a little closer to see what she has created. . . .  As with all of Portis's books, natural science is served sunny-side up, without a word out of place, in this essential guide."—School Library Journal, 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

From the Publisher

★ 08/01/2022

PreS-Gr 1—Like tissue paper held up to a sunny window, Portis's pictures have the glow of stained glass, offering texture and inviting readers to come a little closer to see what she has created. A seed grows, but on the title page that seed is still in the bird's beak. It falls, settles into the soil, and sun and rain are simply present, part of the process. Soil, sun, water, air, and the seed takes root, grows tall, forms a bud, blossoms into more seeds, which feed more birds, and the cycle is complete. This approach to nature requires no embellishment, no anthropomorphizing, no cheerleading to lure in young eyes. Four- to five-word sentences on the left set off every gemlike illustration on the right, breaking format only when the book needs to be turned sideways so that the full glory of the sunflower's height can be revealed. The back matter includes charming layouts of the parts of the seed and root, what the seed needs to sprout, and the life cycle of the sunflower plant. Complicated scientific principles are rendered simply and gracefully in scenes that seem to deliver a dose of Vitamin D. VERDICT As with all of Portis's books, natural science is served sunny-side up, without a word out of place, in this essential guide.—Kimberly Olson Fakih

School Library Journal

2022-01-12
A piecemeal overview of the life cycle of a plant.

Using her signature minimalist prose and stripped-down art, Portis follows the journey of a sunflower seed from the moment it “settles into the soil” to its emergence as a blossom that eventually parents new sunflower plants. The entire text consists of one long sentence, broken up into fragments across the book’s spreads. Except for a few well-chosen double-page illustrations, the full-color artwork appears on the recto pages while the text appears on the verso pages. Readers watch as sunshine and rain help the seed grow into a bud and then a tall flower whose grandeur and height are accentuated by a switch from a horizontal page layout to a vertical one. The flower produces seeds, which are dispersed by birds after they feed, beginning the process of new plant growth all over again. The book offers a close-up look at plant reproduction using simple, accessible language that preschoolers can understand. Youngsters will feel a sense of awe as they witness the magic of a seed’s first tender shoot and the symbiosis of nature. The backmatter uses spot art to highlight the parts of a sunflower seed and plant and four things that “the seed needs to sprout”; it also includes a diagram of the sunflower’s life cycle.

An understated, useful primer on one of nature’s miraculous cycles. (Informational picture book. 3-6)

Kirkus Reviews