21st Century Junior Library: Plants

School Library Journal

Reviewed on 1 November 2009

These colorful, cleanly designed books incorporate activities designed to exercise basic science skills, such as observation, estimation, and comparison, but are uneven in quality. In the first book, seed, spore, bulb, cutting, and division are given the once-over; while the text states that tulips and daffodils grow from bulbs, there is no explanation of how bulbs are formed. Flowers neglects to identify and label the parts of a flower, concentrating instead on seeds and pollination. Sunlight identifies the three basic needs of plants and provides a very simple summary of photosynthesis and the movement of food and nutrients through a plant’s vascular system–without using the words “photosynthesis” or “vascular.” Plants We Eat, Trees, and Healing Plants are stronger titles, offering basic overviews of their topics. However, while the photographs are clear and informative, all of the books suffer from a lack of labeled diagrams.