Reviews
The "Watch It Grow" series provides a first introduction to plant and animal life cycles, exploring how living things grow and reproduce. Emergent readers (pre-K to grade 1) will learn how new life begins and develops. Eleven 24-page titles are available covering beans, bees, butterflies, chickens, dogs, frogs, penguins, sunflowers, turtles, apples and oak trees. In January 2011 all titles will be available in Spanish. Educational Dealer November 2011 Issue, With large, colorful photographs on every page and a big, easy-to-read font, this series of books about plant and animal life cycles will appeal to both students and teachers. The format and organization in each volume is identical. Teachers will appreciate the nonfiction text features: table of contents, picture glossary, and index. A graphic organizer of each life cycle, depicted on one page, concisely sums up the facts in four stages. Many photographs are labeled to help young readers understand unfamiliar words. Notes to teachers and parents at the end provide suggested pre- and post-reading activities or related book titles. For example, in A Butterfly's Life, Eric Carle's The Very Hungary Caterpillar is listed as a fiction text connection. Libraries needing to update their collection in this curricular area will find the series a solid choice. - Barbara S. Zinkovich, formerly of Hollis Academy, Greenville, South Carolina Library Media Connection November/December 2010 Issue, Practically unique among early introductions to life cycles because death is mentioned in each volume, this series follows selected plants or animals from egg or seed to maturity with a set of close-up color photographs, one per page, paired to large-type, one- or two-sentence captions. The texts are written to the same pattern, so there is some repetition (most extensively in the plant titles) and the information, though accurate, is sometimes a bit too sketchy-most notably in Bee's Life, which devotes a page to drones without explaining their function, and uses "larvae" without noting that it's a plural form. Still, the series offers nourishing fare for young naturalists, and every volume closes with a one-page recapitulation and suggested classroom activities (some of which are book-based) to reinforce the presentations. -John Peters, formerly at New York Public Library School Library Journal November 2010
