Plants

When you’re hungry, you need to get food from a store, your kitchen or a garden. Plants never have to go shopping for food – they make their own food all by themselves. All they need are a few seemingly simple ingredients, and they’re ready to go…and grow.

A plant’s recipe for food has only three main ingredients: sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water. When plants make their food, they give off what animals need – oxygen. Without oxygen, animals like us wouldn’t be able to breathe. If plants weren’t here on Earth, we wouldn’t be here.

There are all sorts of amazing plants growing all around the world. Plants living in deserts have prickly spines discourage animals from eating them. Dandelion plants send their seeds off on the wind. Some tropical plants even trap and eat whole live insects. Plants are growing wild all over the place.

“Leaf” it up to Bill to give you the facts on plants.

The Big Ideas

• Unlike animals, plants make their own food
• Plants use sunlight to take carbon dioxide from the air and release oxygen
• Although most plants cannot move around, they have developed many other ways of living on Earth

Did You Know That?

• The most leaves ever found on a clover plant is 14?
• A certain species of water lily grows leaves up to 2 meters wide and flowers that are 30 centimeters long?
• Plants make rubber that we use to make tires, gloves and paint?

Books of Science!

• “Atlas of Plants” by Gallimard Jeunesse, Claude Delafosse, and Sylvaine Perols Published by Scholastic, 1994.
• “The Plant Cycle” by Nina Morgan. Published by Thomson Learning, 1993