Teaching your elementary students about plants? Don’t forget to grab a few books to keep in your classroom library! You can use these plant books as reference texts, read alouds, or simply have them available to your young readers throughout your plant unit! All books listed below come with affiliate links to Amazon.
Seed to Plant
First, this National Geographic Reader is the perfect plant book for your class library! Like all National Geographic Readers, this book explains the science of plants in a simple and understandable way. Kids will go on a journey from the pollination of a see to plant growth. They will learn more about the plants, flowers, and trees they see every day and what they need to thrive! Of course, there are beautiful pictures and fantastic text features (including bold vocabulary words, diagrams, labeled drawings, graphs, and more).
Link: Seed to Plant
From Seed to Plant
This next plant book is by the wonderful Gail Gibbons! She uses bright illustrations to weave the nonfiction text together. The book details the processes of pollination, seed formation, and germination. Gail Gibbons reinforces the important vocabulary by including simple and accessible explanations, clear diagrams, and illustrations.
The book also has instructions for a seed-growing project, and a page of interesting facts about plants, seeds, and flowers.
Link: From Seed to Plant
How a Seed Grows
Similarly, this next book talks about how a seed grows with great illustrations and clear explanations. However, this book tells it more like the story of how an acorn becomes an oak tree. Students will be engaged with the process of seed to tree. There is a How-To section where students can grow their own plant from a seed by following the directions!
Link: How a Seed Grows
Flowers
This next plant book is focused specifically on flowers! The photos in this book show the beautiful science of flowers! An introduction to botany, young readers will learn about how flowers grow. They will learn about flowers growing from seeds or bulbs, from pollination and bees, and more! I like that this book goes into more detail about the differences in how flowers grow!
Link: Flowers
A Tree is a Plant
This book is from the same series as “How a Seed Grows.” Like that plant book, this one will focus on an apple tree and its development and growth throughout the four seasons. It is an engaging environmental science book that young kiddos can access and understand. Students will learn how trees get food, what happens to them during the winter, and more!
Link: A Tree is a Plant
Magic School Bus: Plant Seeds
Finally, we all love a good Magic School Bus book! In this one, Ms. Frizzle’s class is growing a garden. Since Phoebe is new, her flowers are at her old school, leaving her plot empty. On their trip to her old plot to retrieve some of her flowers, they end up traveling inside the flowers and finding out how the parts of the flowers work and how plant seeds grow!
Link: Magic School Bus: Plant Seeds
Suggested Resources
If you’re looking for supplemental materials for your plant unit, check out this No Prep Resource! The unit comes with printable and digital versions of reading passages, cut and paste activities, graphic organizers, vocabulary sheets, and more!
I also have two other resources that are great for your Plants unit! Grab one of these to make your planning and prep so much simpler. Here is a flip book where students can read and write about the plants while creating a fun craft and a set of presentation slides and scripts to teach about plants without having to make your own! Click the buttons below to get a closer look:
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