Secret of the Garden by Kathleen Zoehfeld - ADVISABLE

Zoehfeld, Kathleen Weidner  Secret of the Garden:  Food Chains and the Food Web in our Backyard,  Illustrated by Priscilla Lamont  Alfred A. Knopf (Random), 2012.  PICTURE BOOK  Content: G.  

This is a story of a little family that has a garden in the backyard.  In the spring time, the individual family members pick their favorite things to plant and they follow the growth through seedlings, to sprouts and to a full plant.  While they are watching their plants grow they talk about different insects that live in the garden and two hens in sidebars talk about the food chain.  At the end the two hens draw a food web using all the people, animals, insects and vegetables in the garden.  There are interesting facts throughout the book about vegetables and the parts that we eat, whether insects are carnivores or herbivores, and how worms help the soil.  

This book contains a lot of information and isn’t simply a children’s story about a garden.  The illustrations are very detailed and the sidebars are interesting without taking away from the overall flow of information.  

EL (K-3), EL (4-6)-ADVISABLE.  Reviewer, C. Peterson.