What Goes Around Comes Around! The Life Cycle of an Apple by Gillian Clifton

HOW ARE APPLE TREES LIKE COMPUTER PROGRAMS? 

 Apple trees, like all seed-producing plants, go through a life cycle. Their seeds are dropped inside their fruit to be eaten by animals who eat them, or are released as the fruit rots to reseed the plant in the next growing season. They grow into sprouts and then seedlings with leaves, gradually form bark for production, and grow until they are mature enough to make their own fruit with its own seeds to grow more and more apples with more and more seeds. Plant scientists call this the mighty and mysterious life cycle, through which all living things go.

The plant begins its life cycle, drops seeds, and dies. By dropping seeds, the plant starts the life cycle all over again. The cycle is like a loop that happens over and over.

Computer programmers use the concept of cycles to produce looping actions that also repeat a series of operations. But nature got there first, and when the perennial apple-picking season rolls around this year, Gillian Clifton's look at The Life Cycle of an Apple Tree: Over and over Again (Computer Science for the Real World) (Rosen Classroom, 2018), takes a a cross-the-curriculum look at the ability of apple trees to provide a perfect illustration of the scientific concept of looping. Clifton's language is simple, but with a poetry of its own, (downright cosmic, man) with generous color photographs of every step in the growing cycle, from a tender, almost transparent sprout to a seedling with a few mature leaves to a tree heavy with fruit in autumn, ending with the sweet and hand-sized apple that every child will know well, right down to its core with those dark seeds.

A tree lives in another way, too. When the tree dies, it returns its nutrients to the soil. From there new plants may grow. This life cycle loop happens for every apple tree you see!

As proper informational books do, Gillian Clifton's easy-to-read nonfiction book offers a brief appendix with glossary and index, along with a section of large-group and individual enrichment activities for teachers and parents. For more autumn fun with the life cycle, share this one with this season's other star, the pumpkin, here.