The Reason for a Flower

The Reason for a Flower 

Author: Ruth Heller

Illustrator: Ruth Heller 

Grade Level: 1-3

Genre: Non-Fiction 

Awards: none

Summary: This book takes the reader through the life of flowers.  These seemingly delicate plants offer more resources that many might imagine.  Before reading this, many might think flowers are meant for visual enjoyment only.  After reading through this, the reader will soon find out that there is a lot more a flower have to offer throughout its life.  After going through the lifespan of a flower, the book concludes with the way that flower might be used as a resource - grains, perfumes, shampoos, etc.  Flowers give us most of the resources we use on a daily basis.  

Evaluation: I never knew all the reasons for a flower.  This book taught a lot in few, simple words.  I was amazed how much this book was able to say about flowers using mostly easy vocabulary.  The illustrations in this book were beautiful as well.  I think this will be a book I will have on my future shelf due to its informativeness. 

The readability is between first and third grade.  The author did a wonderful job at explaining harder concepts in simple, understandable ways.  The vocabulary was appropriate for younger readers and helpful for older readers.

You could relate this book to different works that mention a floral metaphor.  You could use this book to help students make predictions as to why an author might include a metaphor of a flower.  This book might help them see the importance of a flower and how it offers a lot of resources to us and connect it to the other text (text-to-text connections).