Photosynthesis, taught nine ways.

Year 8 finish the photosynthesis unit by showing they can follow carbon through a plant. In Canva for Education, on class accounts, each student makes a six-panel comic about one carbon atom: out of a bus exhaust as carbon dioxide, in through an open stoma, across the air spaces into a palisade cell, into glucose in a chloroplast, stored as starch in the leaf, and eaten by a caterpillar that releases it again through respiration. Students start from a blank six-panel grid, draw or place their own shapes and speech bubbles without templates or animation, and must use one key term correctly in every caption, with the last panel linking back to the first. The teacher marks the comics after the lesson against the same checklist the department used when this comic was built in PowerPoint, before the school moved to Canva.

Tools: Canva Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

The school's Year 6 transition day includes a science taster, and Year 8 make the resource over two lessons. In groups of three, students make a 90-second video in Adobe Express for Education answering the question a Year 6 teacher sent over: why do plants need light? Each group scripts five scenes, using diagrams they draw and photographs of the class's own pondweed practical that show hands and equipment but no faces, and records a voice-over for each scene, re-recording any that run long or use a word Year 6 will not know. The teacher checks each video before sharing it with the Year 6 teachers through the school's learning platform, set to school login, and the class watches two finished videos to agree what made them clear.

Tools: Adobe Express Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Over two lessons, Year 8 build a working model of their pondweed practical in Scratch, using class accounts managed by the teacher. The teacher provides a stage with a pondweed sprite and two sliders, light and carbon dioxide, each from 0 to 10, and each student writes their own program that releases oxygen bubbles at a rate set by the sliders. Most first versions make the bubble rate climb for ever as the light goes up, so the teacher shows the class's results from last week's practical, where the count stopped rising much once the lamp was close, and students rewrite their rule so that whichever slider is lower sets the rate. Students then swap models with a partner, try to break them with extreme settings, and finish by writing how their program explains the class's results.

Tools: Scratch Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 have seen a leaf cross-section and now need to connect each structure to its job. The teacher shares one Microsoft Whiteboard board per pair through school accounts, holding nine feature cards, such as waxy cuticle, palisade cells packed with chloroplasts, air spaces in the spongy layer, stomata and guard cells, and nine function cards, such as reducing water loss, absorbing as much light as possible and letting carbon dioxide reach the cells. Pairs drag each feature onto its function and then move the matched pair to the right place on a cross-section diagram in the middle of the board. The teacher circulates and asks any pair with a doubtful match to explain it, and students finish by writing their three strongest pairs in their books as feature, function and how it helps photosynthesis.

Tools: Microsoft Whiteboard Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 can recite the word equation, but many still believe a plant's mass comes from the soil. The teacher shows a photograph of a mature oak and asks in Mentimeter where most of its mass came from: the soil, water, the air or sunlight. Answers come in anonymously and the board shows the spread, and rather than give the answer, the teacher shares Jan Baptist van Helmont's willow experiment, published in 1648 after his death, in which a 5-pound willow grew to about 169 pounds in five years while its 200 pounds of dried soil lost about 2 ounces. Pairs argue about what van Helmont concluded, that the mass came from water, and what he missed, the carbon dioxide from the air, and then everyone votes again. The teacher puts the two results side by side, asks two students who changed their answer to explain why, and spends the last part of the lesson with the students still choosing soil, tracing the carbon in glucose back to the air.

Tools: Mentimeter Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Over two weeks, Year 8 run one long experiment together in the first fifteen minutes of six science lessons. The technician seals a potted pelargonium in a clear plastic propagator with the department's data-logging carbon dioxide sensor and a micro:bit that logs the light level inside the box every five minutes, with an LED lamp on a stand outside, and before each lesson the readings are exported to a shared Google Sheet that charts them. Students read the curves since the last lesson, including the nights and the weekend, then choose the next condition from lamp distance, a green filter over the box, darkness or half the leaves covered in foil, and write a prediction of the curve's shape before the teacher sets it up and opens the lid to refresh the air. By the end they have seen carbon dioxide fall in light and climb in the dark, level off when the lamp is far away and fall more slowly behind the green filter, and each student writes a conclusion about light and photosynthesis from the class's own chain of tests.

Tools: micro:bit, Google Sheets Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 are starting photosynthesis, and the teacher opens with how scientists first found out that plants change the air. A slide deck tells the story in pictures: Joseph Priestley's 1771 experiment, in which a candle burning in a sealed jar went out and a sprig of mint left in that air for several days 'restored' it so a candle would burn again, then his mouse that survived in air a plant had restored, and Jan Ingenhousz's 1779 finding that plants restore air when they are in light and that it is the green parts that do it. Before each result appears, the teacher asks the class to predict what happened, and students write their prediction and then the result in their books. The lesson ends with students writing the word equation, carbon dioxide + water → glucose + oxygen, with light and chlorophyll above the arrow, and labelling which parts of it each experiment gave evidence for.

Tools: PowerPoint Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Before Year 8 make their own nail-varnish peels of a leaf's lower surface, the teacher shows them what they are looking for. A school tablet on a clamp stand sits over the eyepiece of the demonstration microscope, and its camera view is mirrored to the board at 400 times magnification. The class watches as the teacher moves across a peel from a privet leaf, stops on a pair of guard cells around an open stoma, focuses up and down, and then swaps to a peel from the upper surface of the same leaf, where there are far fewer stomata. Students sketch a stoma and its guard cells in their books from the board and write a sentence on why most stomata are on the underside, then make and examine their own peels at the class microscopes.

Tools: Built-in camera (slow motion and time-lapse) Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

On Monday the class set up two bunged boiling tubes of hydrogencarbonate indicator, one with a sprig of pondweed and one without, in front of an LED lamp on a plug-in timer that switches on and off every twelve hours. A school tablet on a stand records the tubes in time-lapse for 48 hours, with a dim green bulb, far too weak for the pondweed to photosynthesise faster than it respires, so the camera can see through the dark hours. On Wednesday the teacher plays the two days back in under two minutes: the class watches the pondweed tube turn from orange-red to purple under the lamp, drift back through red to yellow overnight and turn purple again when the lamp comes on, while the tube without pondweed stays orange-red. The teacher replays each switch of the lamp and asks what the colour says about carbon dioxide in the tube, and students fill in a strip in their books showing the colour every six hours, with a sentence on photosynthesis and respiration for each.

Tools: Built-in camera (slow motion and time-lapse) Nine ideas for your own version in Generate