What do plants eat?

What do plants eat?

Lesson narration:
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DISCUSS (1 of 2):

All that 4 million pounds of wood must have come from somewhere. What do you think plants eat? Do they even eat?

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DISCUSS (2 of 2):

How could you find out?

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DISCUSS:

Go ahead and take a guess. If the tree had been eating the soil, then what do you think the scientist will notice?

Why do you think this?

Weight of sapling and soil

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DISCUSS:

Do you think that air weighs anything?




What could you do to find out? Can you think of an experiment that would let you weigh air?

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soil


1 of 12

covers the Earth's surface; made of tiny rocks and material from dead plants and animals
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oxygen


2 of 12

a type of gas that animals use to breathe and that plants release
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carbon dioxide


3 of 12

a type of gas that plants sometimes take in and that animals release when they breathe
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stomata


4 of 12

the tiny openings on plant leaves that take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen
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producer


5 of 12

a living thing that makes its own food
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food chain


6 of 12

how living things are connected through what they eat and what they are eaten by
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matter


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anything that takes up space; can be in different forms such as solid, liquid, or gas
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matter flow


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the movement of material through an ecosystem, such as through food chains and food webs
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investigate


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to figure out the answer to a question or to understand how something works
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measure


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to describe something using numbers that can be compared
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balance scale


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a tool that weighs two items and compares them to see which one is heavier
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experiment


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a test used to discover new information about a question
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Exploration
bacon by By warszawianka
vegetables on a plate by Mila Supinskaya
bacon strips by Sergiy Kuzmin
pigs by yevgeniy11
corn by Vaclav Volrab
burger by fotocrisis
cow by DnD-Production.com
grass by antpkr
chicken legs by Tsekhmister
chicken by Tsekhmister
meal by anakondasp
chickens roaming grass by FiledIMAGE
beetle by Ryan Hodnett
pan of general sherman by David Gair
general sherman by NAParish , used under CC BY-SA
elephant by Kletr
acorn in hand by Colin Browne , used under CC BY-SA
acorn by Petr Salinger
girl standing on scale by Alan Poulson Photography
farmer/tree/field by Feylite
man holding dirt by Photo Africa
Jan von Helmont by Art Serving Science , used under Public Domain
flower pot by Vitaly Korovin
dirt by grafvision
sapling by Protasov AN
watering can by Vitaly Korovin
leaves by vovan
water by Fisher Photostudio
Female Scientists Using Microscopes In Laboratory by Monkey Business Images
Plant Stomata by D. Kucharski K. Kucharska
wilted pot plant by OhEngine
empty hand green background by Chutima Chaochaiya
woman in greenhouse by Dragon Images
general sherman by Songquan Deng
redwood trunk by Galyna Andrushko
Wood circle texture slice background by Sergieiev
corn growing by bergamont
chemistry by Africa Studio
Activity
trees forest by BMJ
basketball by Lightspring
beach ball by Olga Popova
balloon by Vladimir Skopcev
pinched hand by photka
weighing scales by EdBockStock
gold scales by graphixmania
balloons by Luis Santos
trees with faces by Kyle Pearce , used under CC BY-SA
Other
Unit: empty plate on wood background by koosen
Lesson narration:

Activity Prep

Print Prep

In this lesson, students discover the surprising nutrient which accounts for most of a plant's food. In the activity, Weighing Air, students blow up balloons and place them on both sides of a large balance scale constructed from a yardstick. Then, students let the air out of all the balloons on one side of the balance to directly observe that air has weight.

Preview activity

Exploration

21 mins

Wrap-Up

4 mins

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