Cells!

Well, we've pretty much learned all we can about the Macrocosm (not quite, but you know what I mean!) so now it's time to start learning about the Microcosm! We've been mentioning cells every once in a while, but today was the first day we decided to get tiny and dive in.  We started with a basic animal cell. I drew this picture in reference to a diagram on the Enchanted Learning website so we would have a cell to refer to. Www.enchantedlearning.com is a great website for homeschooling ~ whenever I'm looking for something, I usually find it there!

Well, I've discovered that the way to my kids' brains is through food (especially sweets) so what better way to begin than making an edible cell model for a snack?  I saw some really great-looking recipes for Jello cell models online, and that was my plan, but I didn't have any Jello at home and really really didn't want to drag the kids to the store. I was thinking there must be something in the kitchen I could use ~oh yes. Bagels for the base of the cell. We just happened to have purple frosting leftover from Cat-in-the-Hat day for the cytoplasm.  The nucleus is a huge grape, the blue licorice pieces are the E.R. and the golgi apparatus. The raisins are vacuoles, the gumdrops are lysosomes, the jelly beans are mitochondria, the pillow candy is the chloroplast, and the sprinkles are ribosomes. Not bad!

After our snack, I took a hula hoop, a table cloth, and a huge ball into the living room and began building a giant cell model from toys. The kids were instantly at my heels at their own free will, helping me build it. Fynn began asking me the names of the organelles, trying to remember them.

Among other things, we had scarves for the E.R. and golgi apparatus, and a really cool orange ball that looks just like a chloroplast!

Two different sized sets of balls are the vacuoles and lysosomes, legos are mitochondria, and marbles are the ribosomes.  The hula hoop is the cell membrane and the table cloth is the cytoplasm, and of course the huge purple ball is the nucleus!

We watched a Bill Nye the Science guy episode on cells, and Fynn went outside and drew a cell model with chalk!

He also drew himself and Rowan and me and filled us up with marble cells!

These were his own ideas :)!

 We have been eating hard-boiled eggs for lunch lately, and we were surprised to find out that an egg is considered a cell! (Food again)

 Who knows what we'll discover about cells next?
Happy learning!
~Beth