Category: Biology
Subject: science
Key stage: ks3
Year: year-9
Description: This unit covers photosynthesis, including how plants produce carbohydrates, absorb water and minerals, and the role of leaf stomata in gas exchange. It highlights the importance of photosynthesis in sustaining life on Earth and explores the adaptations of leaves for photosynthesis.
Why this, why now: This unit builds on pupils’ prior learning from Breathing and respiration, where they explored how organisms use oxygen to release energy from food. It deepens their understanding by examining plant nutrition and photosynthesis, focusing on how plants produce their own food using light, carbon dioxide, and water. This prepares pupils for the next unit, Eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells, where they will apply their knowledge of energy processes to understand cellular structures and functions, highlighting the differences in how cells support life across various organisms.
Prior knowledge requirements: [Y2] Plants need light and water to grow. [Y3] Plants need air and nutrients from soil to grow. [Y3 & Y4] Plants are producers because they make their own food in their leaves. Cellular respiration is a chemical process that uses glucose from food as a fuel to provide energy for life processes.
National curriculum content: Plants making carbohydrates in their leaves by photosynthesis and gaining mineral nutrients and water from the soil via their roots The role of leaf stomata in gas exchange in plants The reactants in, and products of, photosynthesis, and a word summary for photosynthesis The dependence of almost all life on Earth on the ability of photosynthetic organisms, such as plants and algae, to use sunlight in photosynthesis to build organic molecules that are an essential energy store and to maintain levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere The adaptations of leaves for photosynthesis
Unit lessons: