Tuesday, September 11, 2012

CC Week 3 Science- Tasty Tasty Cells

I think that it's a generally accepted fact that if you can craft something out of food, your children will remember it.

Or, maybe that generally accepted fact is that calories don't count if they are educational.

Something like that.  One of those must be true.

Science week 3 is tell me some parts of an animal cell.  Armed with my debit card, and the need to fill up my tank of gas, and the desire to burn an afternoon, I picked up several kinds of candy, and when we got home, I had my oldest make brownies as a reading comprehension exercise.  (That means he reads and follows the directions and I sit and try to keep my mouth shut unless he's read a fraction incorrectly and is about to put "1 or 2 cups of oil" instead of 1/2 cup of oil).

 A cake would work equally as well.  You'll need a cell base (cake or brownies, we used a round pan), frosting (because cytoplasm tastes better as sugar), and then various things to use as organelles.
 Optional, but I labeled a paper plate and put stars on the ones we actually had in the memory work.  I may have over-bought treats.  We used a cookie for the nucleus, honey cashews for the mitochondria, peanut butter M&Ms for the vacuoles, gummy worms for golgi bodies, and skittles for the lysomes and centrisomes.  I used cake sprinkles for ribosomes.
 Spreading is an important pre-writing skill. (I can't prove that)
The finished cell.  It was delicious! Everyone asked for a piece based on the type of organelles they wanted to get, and they told daddy about the various parts and functions before we dug in.

No comments: