Watch It Grow: Backyard Life Cycles

Barbara Reid has worked her magic again. Young and old will once more fall in love with the world she creates with her plasticine art.

In Watch It Grow: Backyard Life Cycle, Reid draws readers into the backyard she creates where frogs hatch from eggs laid in the pond, monarch butterflies transform from eggs on milkweed leaves to caterpillars, a chrysalis, finally transforming into a beautiful orange and black butterfly. A seed waits through the winter to bloom into a large yellow sunflower in the summer, and an acorn takes root and grows for 50 years until is an oak tree capable of producing more acorns.

Reid’s magic is not only in describing and illustrating the life cycles of these four common plants and animals, but it is also found in her creating the background details that are so familiar to young southern Canada readers. The milkweed plants wave in the breeze as the clouds drift by as the young caterpillar eats its way through the milkweed leaves. Readers can see the bites the caterpillar has taken. The butterfly emerging from the chrysalis with its wings still wet and folded is an amazingly illustrative work of art.

Reid devotes six pages to each life cycle. The monarch butterfly’s life is measured in days from hatching to a mature butterfly able to produce more eggs while the oak takes fifty years or more from the time the acorn takes root until the oak tree can produce more acorns. Sunflower seeds fall to the ground in the autumn and take a year to complete their entire life cycle. Green frogs transform from eggs laid underwater to tadpoles still living in the water but gulping “air from the surface of the water” to frogs living on land.

At the back of the book, Reid includes a one-page summary of each of the four life cycles, but it is the details throughout that will get students (and their adults) wanting to head outdoors to see what is growing in their own neighbourhoods.

I highly recommend that you purchase and share Watch It Grow: Backyard Life Cycles with every young person you can find to help nurture the next generation of nature lovers.