What is sugar made of?

Sugar is tiny sweet bits. It is sweet because plants make it. Leaves use sun, air, and water. We scoop it like white sand.

Sugar is made of tiny pieces from plants. Plants use sun, air, and water to make sweet food inside their leaves and stems. Then people get the sugar out. Each tiny piece is like a little block in a toy tower. Many blocks together make the white grains you see.

The sugar in a sugar bowl is mostly sucrose. Sucrose is made of very tiny atoms called carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Atoms are the small building pieces of everything. Plants make sucrose by using sunlight, water, and a gas in the air called carbon dioxide. Then people take it from sugar cane or sugar beets and clean it into crystals. Fun fact: sugar cane is a giant grass, and some stalks can grow taller than a grown-up.