What is a life cycle? A life cycle is the changes that take place from birth, through growing up to adult, old age and death.

Life cycle

The life cycle of a plant.

Living things all share the same pattern: they are born, they grow up and they die. This is called a life cycle.

Everything that has ever lived has had a life cycle. In some living things the life cycle can be very long. Some trees live for thousands of years. People can have quite a long life cycle of 70 years or more. But many things have much shorter life cycles. Many flowering plants, for example, grow up, set seed and die all within a few months. Some insects have a life cycle of just a few days. Bacteria may live for just a few hours.

The video below looks at tadpoles, which show a very dramatic change between parts of a life cycle of a frog.

Video: life cycle of a tadpole.

Explore these further resources...

(These links take you to other parts of our web site, never to outside locations.)

You can search in these books:

You can look in this topic for more books, videos and teacher resources:

Jump to Life cycles toolkit screen

The toolkit screen link will take you to a library containing a selection of:
an i-topic, more books, pictures, videos and teacher's stuff related to the search word.