How Does Food Provide My Body With Energy?

This cross-disciplinary units targets core ideas about food, photosynthesis and cellular respiration in the context of living systems. The unit builds core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and scientific practices addressed in other IQWST units, providing an opportunity to synthesize and to deepen understandings. Students address chemical reactions and the energy transformations associated with them, and address their relevance in their own lives and to their own bodies. Students investigate food at the molecular level and explore how cellular respiration, as a chemical reaction, allows organisms to use the energy in food. They also examine photosynthesis as the chemical reaction in which plants transform light energy into chemical energy to store in food. This unit thus builds understanding of a key crosscutting concept—the flow of matter and energy—as students consider what happens in a system during cellular respiration and photosynthesis.