Fifth Grade
Worksheets
Tasting Sunlight
So, whenever you eat a plant, you are tasting sunlight! And whenever you exhale, you are helping a plant to stay alive! -John C. Brown, University of Kansas
The most important job of plants is to use the energy of the sun to make their own food. Every plant you see is working to turn that energy into sugars. While they do all that hard work, they give off the oxygen that we breathe. Plants are the basis of all life on Earth.
Plants make their food in special places in their cells called chloroplasts. All the green parts of plants have chloroplasts, but most photosynthesis (food making) takes place in the leaves. There are a lot of chloroplasts on each leaf, about one-half million per square millimeter!
