If you have a pet you know you have to feed and water it. We need food and water as well. These two ingredients provide the energy we need to survive. Something we don’t think about needing food and water is a plant. Plants are also living things just like we are. Every plant needs food and water. Without plants all other living beings would die because we need the nutrients that come from plants as well as the oxygen they make. How do plants eat? We certainly don’t see them out in a field with a fork and spoon!

Plants eat through a process called photosynthesis. Photosynthesis needs four ingredients to work – water, sunlight, carbon dioxide and chlorophyll. But first it needs the star of the show, the plant’s leaves. Leaves from different plants look different but they all do the same important job. Leaves not only help plants eat but they also breathe for the plant by taking in a gas called carbon dioxide and releasing a gas called oxygen. The veins we see on most leaves are like the veins under your own skin but they don’t move blood. A plant's veins move water in and then move sugars to other parts of the plant. This makes a plant's stems and veins a very busy, and important subway system.

To create the food, or glucose, a plant needs the sun to shine on its leaves. At the same time carbon dioxide is also absorbed through the leaves. Carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring gas. While this is going on, water and nutrients that are absorbed through the roots of the plants are transported through stems and veins to get to the leaves. Inside the leaves is an organelle called a chloroplast. This tiny part of a leaf can only be seen with a microscope. The chloroplast is where photosynthesis happens. Think of a chloroplast as a tiny solar panel. 

Inside the chloroplast is chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is what makes the leaf look green. Its main job is to convert sunlight into glucose. When the Chlorophyll takes in the sunlight, water and carbon dioxide, and the ingredients work together to make the glucose, then oxygen is released into the atmosphere. The process all put together is photosynthesis.