Unlike animals plants do not have to feed on other organisms. They collect energy from the sun and build most substances needed to grow by themselves. This process is called photosynthesis and is one of the most important processes on earth. It maintains the gas balance in the atmosphere and is the basis of most food chains. Understanding how plants collect sun energy and change it to organic substances is crucial to grasp their role as food providers. The food unit explores science in a context that is crucial in any curriculum. It links real world experiences to aspects of plant science from germination and plant growth, to human dependence on insect pollination for fruit production. Classification of plants into families underpins the need for humans to recognize edible plants which lead on to healthy eating and questions about the sustainability of food supplies. Since different cross-curricular activities are used throughout the whole project, some modules are intended to cover the wide scope of arts. Fine arts, arts and crafts, music, drama, traditions and customs are included in a range of creative projects. The activities can be attempted with children form 6 to 12 years of age. The next topic introduces the concept of plant extinction, illustrating the threats that endanger plants in the wild, the need for their conservation and the different means in which this can be attained. Pupils will see what scientists can do to conserve plants and the environment and by means of role play games, play decide games and explore invent sessions, will be encouraged to engage with plant conservation and to think about the sustainable development of their own country. Children are encouraged to generate their own questions, experiment and find evidence, record outcomes, use scientific language in discussion, transfer new knowledge to real world situations and present their findings. ... [Information of the supplier]
The purpose of this web site is to serve as a brokerage of information, a meeting place, a consultation facility and a source for professional update on the most important issues of plant environmental stress. While the site is dynamic and constantly updated it also offers basic educational materials to newcomers into this area who wish to use the site for learning. ... [Information of the supplier]
The main objective of the Plant Ontology Consortium (POC) is to develop, curate and share controlled vocabularies (ontologies) that describe plant structures and growth and developmental stages, providing a semantic framework for meaningful cross-species queries across databases. The Plant Ontology (PO) has been developed and maintained with the primary goal to facilitate and accommodate functional annotation efforts in plant databases and by the plant research community at large. The initial releases of the PO integrated existing ontologies for Arabidopsis, maize and rice; more recent versions of the ontology encompass terms relevant to Fabaceae, Solanaceae and other cereal crops. As a part of the POC project, participating databases such as TAIR, NASC, Gramene and MaizeGDB have been using PO to describe expression patterns of genes and phenotypes of mutants and natural variants. The Plant Ontology Consortium (POC) is funded by the National Science Foundation. ... [Information of the supplier]