For making food at home, you need some basic ingredients e.g. vegetables or meat, oil, spices and sometimes you need heat also.

For food making, plants need three ingredients: water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide.

Plants breathe carbon dioxide just like we breathe oxygen. Plants breathe through tiny little holes in their leaves. You can’t see them if you just look at them, you can only find them if you looked through a microscope.

They get water from the soil through roots and they get heat from the sunlight.

The process of taking these three key ingredients and making them into food is called photosynthesis. Apart from food, plants also make oxygen in this process. Plants don’t need these and release this oxygen in the air. That oxygen is very important for us, we need oxygen to live.

So, by photosynthesis process, the plants are helping us also by making oxygen for us.

How Chlorophyll helps in Photosynthesis?

Plants capture sunlight using a compound called chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is present in the leaves of almost all the plants. Chlorophyll is green, which is why so many plants appear green.

Chlorophyll is present in plants cells in the structures called chloroplasts.

Two Main Phases of Photosynthesis:

Phase 1: In this stage sunlight is captured by the chloroplasts and the energy is stored in a chemical called ATP.

Phase 2: the ATP is used to create sugar and organic compounds. Plants use these foods to live and grow.

The first phase of the process must have sunlight, but the second phase can happen without sunlight and even at night.

In the above animation video, two kids discuss and explain the photosynthesis in simple language. Students from primary and middle school would find it very engaging and teachers can use this video to teach the initial concept of photosynthesis to the beginners.