Do you like to eat things that are sweet like cookies, ice cream, and cake?
Many foods are sweet because they are made with sugar.
One of sugar's most important jobs is helping bread to rise so that we can have a nice fluffy loaf instead of a flat tortilla.
Where does sugar come from?
We get sugar from two different plants: Sugarcane and Sugarbeets.
Most of the sugar used in the world comes from sugarcane but some comes from sugarbeets too. Did you know we grow sugar both ways in the United States of America? Sugarcane only grows in places that are very warm and get a lot of rain (the tropics/areas close to the equator) so we grow them in the states of Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana and Texas.
Sugarbeets don't like to get too hot so we grow them in California, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming.
- Free download (Sugar from Field to Table) - courtesy of The Sugar Association
(This book is mostly informational for older students BUT it does have two very nice work sheets. The first one is a map for filling out where different kinds of sugar are grown - on page 6. The second worksheet is for labeling the parts of the plants (sugarbeet & sugarcane) and is on page 8.)
Clothes are made out of fabric. Fabric is made from plants, animals, insects, or recycled things like plastic bottles.
Plants
Many of the clothes we wear are made out of cotton.
Cotton grows on a plant and looks like a bunch of fluffy white clouds.
Do you see the Cotton on the Cotton Plants in this picture?
When it's ready, the Cotton gets picked off the plants by fancy machines and stacked in big piles. Then it gets washed by a special machine till it's all clean.
Next the Cotton goes through a bunch of different machines that squish, pull, twist and knit it till it becomes fabric that can be made into clothes.
This short video shows the cotton going through this process.
Want more detail? Cotton to Thred & Thred to Fabric (less than 5 min each)
Cotton isn't the only type of plant used to make clothes.
