Teachers' Notes
Grow Your Own
Teachers should check with their own schemes of work to identify which objectives are, and are not, met from GCSE specification in use in your school, by pupils carrying out the Tomato Zone activities.
KS4 Programme of Study
Sc2 Life processes and living things
Green plants as organisms
3) Pupils should be taught:
Nutrition
a) the reactants in, and products of, photosynthesis
b) that the rate of photosynthesis may be limited by light intensity, carbon dioxide concentration or temperature
c) how the products of photosynthesis are utilised by the plant
d) the importance to healthy plant growth of the uptake and utilisation of mineral salts.
Answers to questions
- Tomato Equation
A plant only photosynthesises during light periods (daytime). It respires at all times
- What is the word equation for respiration?
sugar + oxygen → carbon dioxide + water + energy
- What gases will a leaf be producing during the day, and at night?
Day - oxygen, the CO2 made is used by the plant for photosynthesis.
Night - CO2
- The Food Factory
Explain how the palisade cells in a leaf are adapted for photosynthesis.
They are elongated parallel to the direction of the sun's rays so that the light can penetrate deep into the leaf
without passing through too many cell walls. Also, most of the plants chlorophyll is found in the palisade cells.
- Find out what chemical elements are found in carbohydrates, fats and proteins.
Carbohydrates - carbon, hydrogen, oxygen.
Fats - carbon, hydrogen, oxygen.
Protein - carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur