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!