What Makes the Seasons? »

Megan Montague Cash is also the author of I Saw the Sea and the Sea Saw Me.

Why do leaves fall off trees?
What makes flowers bud? What makes snow?

In delightful rhyming verse, Megan Montague Cash asks and answers thoughtful questions children have about the weather and the seasons. As they walk outside or look out the window, children are naturally interested in knowing why the seasons change and what makes weather happen. With bold and colorful artwork that attracts the eye, now even the youngest readers have a chance to learn some of the reasons. With an adorable little girl shown on every spread, here is a book that will appeal to great teachers, wise parents, and most of all, curious kids!

Susan Hepler, Ph.D. - Children's Literature

Rhyming text does a good job in very few words of explaining for preschoolers and early elementary children how spring and summer nurture plants and how light and heat effect them. For instance, the reason that leafs drop in the fall is explained thus: "In all the leaves on all the trees/are teeny tree food factories. /Leaves use sun to make the food. /When there's less sun, leaves come unglued." An adult can augment this at will, but it's enough to get a preschooler thinking about the reasons for seasons. Fall is followed by a winter explanation of snow as one of winter's recipes for resting. A smiling sun and a cat-faced earth circling it introduce the idea that their movement causes seasons and that halfway around the world, seasons are the opposite of the northern hemisphere. In checkerboard arrangement, symbols of each season are arranged, one season to a page. Spring has birds nesting, a melting snowman, umbrella, sprouting bulbs, digging tools, and so forth. There's so much to talk about in this modest little book, including the author information on the jacket flap which appears partly as a rebus, that it will last awhile in the read-aloud pile. Cash uses flat bright color to good advantage and the brown-skinned girl and her cat who lead the season tour are simply and charmingly inviting. 2003, Viking, Ages 3 to 7.