This informational book is full of real life pictures. It goes through the basic steps in the life cycles of animals, insects, and reptiles.

The book See Me Grow by Penelope Arlon and Tony Gordon-Harris is a new publication by Scholastic Inc. in their discover more series. This resource would be categorized as a life cycle book. The book explores the early portion of the life cycle of various animals. The sections predominantly include many pictures of each animal described by captions. These photos usually show the animal in its natural environment. This focus on images gives the book a similar quality to a photographic essay. A flow chart or timeline is also included in each section to describe stages of the given animal's life cycle. A short glossary and index are also included.
The book depicts a life cycle from birth to adolescence or maturity. The book, although fitting into the life cycle category, could be more accurately described as a growth cycle book because it does not inform the entire life cycle in most cases, usually only following up to the point where the animal becomes independent. Photographs effectively and clearly depict the stages these animals go through but the text provided is large and limited, and gives only a brief impression of the cycle of each animal. For example, the section on alligators includes three pictures of their life cycle. The process is illustrated and described as building a nest and laying eggs, the eggs hatching, and the mother bringing the babies down to the water where they can swim immediately. This type of articulation of the cycle is not very in depth but was probably designed this way for lower elementary students. The pages sometimes include additional facts about the animal in question. These facts are expressed as captions describing the photographs of animals in their natural habitats apart from the included flow charts. Some samples of these additional bits of information again using the alligator as an example include such quotes as "alligators are born with a full set of sharp teeth", and "The mother alligator sometimes carries her babies in her mouth", and "Alligator babies stay with their mother for up to two years." These additional facts are helpful usually referring to the common behavior of the animal, such as "Baby frogs live in water. Grown up frogs live on land and in water," but still do not inform the reader to a great extent.
This book although narrow in scope and shallow in depth does function well as an integrated whole due to the system used to format information. Their is even a "how to read" page prior to the table of contents that describes the layout of the sections so the reader will know where to find certain information such as the animal in question, the sequence of growth stages, and the description of these stages as well as other discrete facts. Their is also glossary and index sections described here. This layout system does an effective job of making the images and the text work together to most clearly and concisely describe the growth cycle in question. ( )