It Starts with a Seed

by Laura Knowles, Jennie Webber (Illustrator)

Overview

With lyrical text, enchanting illustrations, and a beautiful fold-out scene to complete the story, this award-winning picture book takes you on a journey through the seasons and years as you follow a seed’s transformation from a seedling to a sapling, then a young tree, until it becomes a large tree with its branches and roots filling the page.

As the tree grows, it is joined by well-loved woodland creatures—squirrels and rabbits, butterflies and owls—who make it their home. A rhyming poem builds page on page, echoing the rings of a growing tree. The story culminates with a foldout page showing a mature tree shedding seeds to continue the beautiful cycle of life. At the back, find the full poem and facts about the specific tree, a sycamore.

Beautiful and evocative, It Starts With a Seed is a factual story that will touch children with its simple, enchanting message of life and growth.

A 2018 Outstanding Science Trade Book for Students: K-12 (National Science Teachers Association and the Children's Book Council)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781910277263
Publisher:	words & pictures
Publication date:	09/05/2017
Series:	It Starts With A Series
Pages:	32
Sales rank:	296,276
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 11.70(h) x 0.40(d)
Lexile:	660L (what's this?)
Age Range:	6 - 9 Years

About the Author

Laura Knowles has a background in children’s publishing and is the author of We Travel So Far, Once Upon a Jungle, The Coral Kingdom, and It Starts with a Seed, winner of the 2017 Margaret Mallett Award for Children’s Non-fiction and shortlisted for the UKLA Book Award 2018. Her love of natural history, words, and art have drawn her to work on books about animals and nature.

Jennie Webber is a London-based visual artist and printmaker. Her etchings and drawings celebrate the diversity and complexity of nature, reflecting her incurable curiosity for the world. Themes of conservation underpin all her work; the idea being that if people are amazed by the natural world, then they will be less likely to destroy it.

Editorial Reviews

Spare, rhyming text and detailed artwork inform readers about the life cycle of a sycamore tree, from seed to maturity—and its role in the ecosystem…While giving a general idea of how one journey from seed to tree influences an entire ecosystem, the text also emphasizes the wonder of growth—and life—itself. The tone is soothing and reverential. No hype here: understated enchantment.” – Kirkus Reviews

A 2018 Outstanding Science Trade Book for Students: K-12 (National Science Teachers Association and the Children's Book Council)—NSTA-CBC

From the Publisher

09/01/2017
PreS-Gr 2—The small seed grows into a sycamore tree in this poetic natural history lesson. "As days turn to weeks,/the seedling has grown:/it's a dragonfly perch!/A ladybird throne!" The spare lines of poetry and simple-colored sketches framed on facing pages follow the tree's growth through the seasons as it spreads beneath the ground and into the air. "It's not just a tree/but a wonderful world,/full of beetles and grubs/and squirrels and birds." Except for that dragonfly and two ladybirds in an early view, the smaller creatures don't appear, but there are assorted birds and a few squirrels up above and rabbits and even two foxes beneath the grown tree. The tree's life cycle is pretty well captured, though two terms will be unfamiliar to picture book listeners/viewers/ "With each passing year/the trunk builds up its rings" offers a teaching moment. The reference to "…their leaf-laden,/bark-bound arboreal home" is heavier going than the rest of the poem. Imported from England (hence the grubs and ladybirds), this offering concludes with a single page printed with the poem that folds out with a double-page view of the seeds and realistic leaves through the seasons. These are labeled with added facts about the sycamore tree. "A single tree can produce as many as 10,000 seeds a year." VERDICT A pleasant bit of early STEM material, perfect for prompting discussion and explanation.—Margaret Bush, Simmons College, Boston

School Library Journal

2017-07-02
Spare, rhyming text and detailed artwork inform readers about the life cycle of a sycamore tree, from seed to maturity—and its role in the ecosystem."It starts with a seed," proclaims the dark ink across from art that shows one helicopter seed in the foreground, dozens gently falling in the background, and a small line of stubble at the bottom, representing the ground. High-quality, cream-colored paper, pencil-framed margins, a well-chosen palette, and excellent use of negative space begin here and continue throughout. The poem continues over two more page turns: "But where does it lead? // To a root, to a shoot, / to a few tiny leaves." Exquisite, naturalistically rendered ink-and-watercolor art encourages readers to pause at each double-page spread. As the tree ages—and subtly shows a hint of sentience—more and more animals assemble in its branches and in the ground surrounding its roots. An abundance of nouns, verbs, and adjectives describing the tree's growth effortlessly increases vocabularies, spread by spread and stanza by stanza. At the end, a foldout uses one page to re-create the entire text as one poem and then offers more information, in prose, about sycamores. While giving a general idea of how one journey from seed to tree influences an entire ecosystem, the text also emphasizes the wonder of growth—and life—itself. The tone is soothing and reverential. No hype here: understated enchantment. (Informational picture book. 3-8)

Kirkus Reviews