Secrets of the Garden: Food Chains and the Food Web in Our Backyard

Secrets of the Garden: Food Chains and the Food Web in Our Backyard
Genre(s)
Age Range
1+
Release Date
February 28, 2012
ISBN
978-0517709900
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Alice's family plants a vegetable garden each spring, and this budding naturalist reports all she sees about how the plants grow, what insects come to eat the plants, and what birds and animals come to eat the insects.  It's the food chain, right in her own backyard!

While Alice's narrative is simple and engaging, science concepts are presented in more depth in sidebars by a pair of very knowledgeable (and highly amusing) chickens! Noted science writer Kathleen Weidner Zoehfeld knows how to layer information to make it accessible to a wide range of readers and useful for educators. And illustrator Priscilla Lamont's funny, friendly paintings make this a garden everyone will want to explore.

Kids will eat up this wonderful book of backyard science—and perhaps they'll even be inspired to eat their vegetables!

Alice's family plants a vegetable garden each spring, and this budding naturalist reports all she sees about how the plants grow, what insects come to eat the plants, and what birds and animals come to eat the insects.  It's the food chain, right in her own backyard!

While Alice's narrative is simple and engaging, science concepts are presented in more depth in sidebars by a pair of very knowledgeable (and highly amusing) chickens! Noted science writer Kathleen Weidner Zoehfeld knows how to layer information to make it accessible to a wide range of readers and useful for educators. And illustrator Priscilla Lamont's funny, friendly paintings make this a garden everyone will want to explore.

Kids will eat up this wonderful book of backyard science—and perhaps they'll even be inspired to eat their vegetables!

Editor reviews

2 reviews
A Great Introduction to Gardening
Overall rating
 
4.0
Plot
 
N/A
Characters
 
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This book is jam-packed with great information to help introduce your child to gardening and the processes by which we get food. I found it especially pertinent this time of year since we have recently done some of the same things laid out in the book. It was helpful having something to be able to sit down and read to explain what it was we were doing as we prepared our soil for planting and planned out our gardens. Although my four-year-old is very interested in looking at and listening to this book, it might be better for older children, since a lot of the pages are crammed with information in a way that is a little too busy for my taste (at times, not throughout the entire book). The illustrations are cute, and although it jumbles up the pages a bit, the side-notes with the chickens explaining different information about photosynthesis, compost, and the like, makes teaching this "scientific" information all the more fun. Overall, I think this is a great pick for anyone planting a garden to help engage their children in the process!
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