Living Root Garden School • Plants & How They Grow • Name: ______________________
🔍 The Case
The case of the leaf that went pale — a leaf kept in the dark turned yellow and stopped growing. What did the darkness take away?
Photosynthesis is the leaf's recipe for sugar: carbon dioxide from the air plus water from the roots plus sunlight makes glucose and oxygen. Glucose is the plant's food and savings account; oxygen is the leftover — the air in your lungs right now.
Leaves look green because of chlorophyll, a green pigment that grabs red and blue light and bounces green light right back at your eyes. Green is the color chlorophyll rejects — you are looking at the leftovers.
Flip a leaf over and look close: dotting the underside are tiny mouth-like pores called stomata. Carbon dioxide drifts in through them, and oxygen and water vapor drift out — every breath you take passed through a stoma first.
Rule out the lookalikes: a leaf that stays in the dark is not resting — it is starving. With no sunlight it cannot make new sugar, but it keeps burning sugar around the clock, so it slowly spends its savings and turns yellow.
Ask: If you cover part of a living leaf with foil, will the covered patch stay green or go pale — and what will the rest of the leaf do? Write your guess before you cover it.
Try: Tape a small square of foil over part of a living leaf, leave it a few days, then peel it off and compare the covered patch with the sunny part. Draw both, shading the covered spot the way it really looks.
Stretch (Teens & Growers ready for more): With a grown-up, test a sunlit leaf and a foil-covered leaf for starch. What does the result say about where the leaf was cooking?
Tell: Fill in the log below — date, how many days, what the covered patch looked like — then finish this sentence in words or a labeled drawing: “The covered patch turned ___ because ___.”
Date
What I saw
What surprised me
Date: ____/____/____
Date: ____/____/____
Date: ____/____/____
Date: ____/____/____
🛠️ Build It
Draw the leaf with the foil patch, before and after — shade the covered spot the way it really looked.
🗣️ Be the Teacher
Tell someone what three things a leaf needs to cook sugar, and what it gives back — in your own words.
🏅 I can…
☐ I can explain how a leaf cooks with sunlight.
Portfolio check
☐ Guide read
☐ Case solved
☐ Ask, Try, Tell done
☐ Build It filed: Before/after leaf comparison
☐ Taught someone
☐ Badge earned: I can explain how a leaf cooks with sunlight.
Living Root Garden School • livingrootgarden.com/homeschool/ • Free — print as many copies as you like. File this sheet with your portfolio log. Sprouts do the Read, the Case, and Build It; Growers try the Ask, Try, Tell stretch when ready; Teens do the whole packet — including teaching it back.