Irving Independent School District

The Life Cycle of a Butterfly chronicles the life of a monarch butterfly, from egg to its own reproduction. This title is a part of the leveled BlastOff! Readers: Life Cycles series. Butterflies is a level 3 entry, which is designed to advance “early readers toward fluency through increased text and concept load, less reliance on visuals, longer sentences, and more literary language.” The book contains the usual elements of nonfiction, including a table of contents, a glossary, a bibliography, and a few diagrams. Bold print words can be located in the glossary at the back of the book. Each stage of the butterfly’s life is represented by stunning color photographs on both single pages and double page spreads. The layouts are cheerful, uncluttered, and energetic, utilizing bright colors. One nice layout feature is on the page discussing the life cycle of a butterfly. There is a large picture of an adult monarch with smaller inset photos of the egg, larva, and pupa stages. Arrows indicate the cyclic nature of the monarch’s life, creating a graphic representation of the textual information included on that page and within other pages of the book. The text supplies an adequate amount of information on the topic without going overboard with statistics and less seminal information. One element of this book which is less than satisfactory is the “On the Web” section in the back of the book. Here you will find directions for using Fact Surfer to find additional web resources about butterflies on the internet. The Blastoff! Readers seem to be hooked on the Fact Surfer search engine. There’s no apparent way to find out who is behind the creation of the engine to assess its quality, validity, or any additional information about its purpose. Unfortunately, there’s nothing special about this search engine; NetTrekker is a better choice and the whole section falls rather flat. However, this book is a perfectly acceptable source for research about butterflies and life cycles and, in addition, will serve as a worthy nonfiction entry into an easy reader collection.