Plant Life Cycle: From Seed to Plant

A seed lying in a box of soil sits at the top of this 1st grade page, and four empty dashed boxes circle down and round from it, linked by curved arrows that lead back to the seed. Across the bottom is a strip of four pictures to cut out along dashed lines, marked with a pair of scissors. The four pictures come mixed up: a seed splitting with a root and a shoot coming out, a small seedling with two leaves, a flowering plant and a plant carrying a pea pod. The child cuts them out and glues each one in the next empty box, going round the arrows from the seed.

The order is the lesson: seed, sprouting seed, seedling, flowering plant, plant with a pod, and back to seeds. Every picture uses the same box of soil, so the only thing that changes from stage to stage is the plant, and children can see the roots grow along with the shoot. The loop matters as much as the order. Arrows running back to the start show that the pod holds new seeds, which is what makes it a cycle rather than a story that ends with a flower.

One sheet, five stages, four to glue. Cutting and gluing takes longer than writing numbers, so allow a full lesson and have glue sticks ready; children who finish early can write one word under each stage. This face sits between the base diagram, which names the parts, and the parts we eat, and it pairs naturally with the butterfly and frog pages in the animal life cycles family. In NGSS it touches 3-LS1-1, brought down here to a simple first grade sequence.