Thursday, December 17, 2015

Thursday December 17th - Light independent reactions / Photosynthesis wrap up.

Today we walked through the book work and I went into some details about the light INDEPENDENT reaction (also known as the dark reaction).

I gave you the book pages to look over since this can be a very tough subject to wrap your brains around!!  We started with these daily questions.


We reviewed the steps of the light dependent reaction and the splitting of water to release Oxygen gas and Hydrogen ions.



 Next up..... Producing SUGAR - Glucose.  Using the following book page we worked through the light independent reaction.
 Finally, I had you write the following wrap up slide in your notes.

Tuesday and Wednesday December 15th and 16th

Tuesday we continued with Photosynthesis and used our pop it bead models to work through the first stage of photosynthesis.

Here is a rundown of the days daily questions, notes and activities


Notes and pics of the activity:
 
This was an INCREDIBLY important step during photosynthesis for two reasons.
#1.  It released the oxygen gas that we need to breathe.
#2.  It helps to power the creation of ATP by adding a phosphate group on the ADP.  This is going to help fuel the NEXT stage of photosynthesis.

Energy from the Sun - Causes electrons to get excited - Water that has entered via the roots.... Gets Split apart......(see next picture)


The Hydrogen ions are then pumped through different photosystems but what WE really care about is that each oxygen binds with one OTHER oxygen to create O2 (molecular oxygen that we breath) which is then released into the atmosphere)

DURING this time - Two energy carriers are created.  Remember.... Energy is STORED in chemical bonds and RELEASED when bonds are broken.  We used out brightly colored beads to represent our energy molecules:
NADP and ADP are in the chloroplast already.
Another Phosphate is Added to ADP to create ATP.
A Hydrogen ion is added to NADP to create NADPH
 These two energy  molecules are what will fuel that second state of photosynthesis.

Wednesday you went through the book and filled out a directed reading about the light dependent reactions.

Photosynthesis and..... Sorry for being a slacker!!!

It's been a while since I have posted!! It's been a busy couple weeks and I haven't done a great job at keeping up on the blog!!

We've had a couple daily questions since the start of this unit

Most of our discussion so far has been based on the book work.  Make sure you stay updated on that!!

Today, after finishing our discussion on the book work, we did manage to get a couple more slides down in our notes:


 Tomorrow we will dive right into Photosynthesis!!