27th September, 2006
Cell Cake: science never tasted so good.
Apologies all around on how long it took me to get this post up. How do you all find time to blog? I’m having blog guilt. Like as a mother I don’t have enough guilt in my diet. Speaking of diets, check out this beauty:
(I have never posted with pictures before, this could be disasterous. Please bear with me.)
Leading up to our tasty little project we studied cells from a couple sources. First we read in How Nature Works about animal and plant cells and what the differences were. This book always has very nice experiments in it. We took scrapings of our cheek cells and examined them under the microscope. Then we used the Usborne Internet Linked Science Encyclopedia to look up animal cells in particular. I love this book because the pictures and graphics are colorful and precise and 3 or 4 internet activities go along with every page. This one had a virtual frog dissection. The information is well presented and you can just hit the high points or really go in depth. We discussed the parts of the cell and what their specific jobs are. I generalized a lot just so this would be fun and familiar later on in his science studies. Here is our list of ingredients, or “organelles”:
Cake mix- obviously because I am a baking hack.
Cytoplasm- white icing would probably show up better but….mmm fudge.
Nucleus- giant gumball filled with Nerds, represents that there is a lot of going on in there.
Mitochondria- Hot Tamales!
Golgi Apparatus- Laffy Taffy (this was the best I could come up with)
Ribosomes- Nerds
Lysosomes- Sweet Tarts
We had fun matching the candy to the shape of the organelle and that helped give the mental picture and tactile learning dimension to a subject that can be hard for younger kids to grasp. We discussed/reviewed as we decorated and then Joe did a little presentation.
Next up, cell division!
Posted at 10:52 pm |
On September 28, 2006 at 8:19 am
laraszoo said:
September 28, 2006 at 8:19 am
That cake looks awesome! I’ll have to remember this when we get to cells. Of course, my kids would want to have 3 nuclei so each could have a gumball.
On September 28, 2006 at 11:06 am
lapazfarm said:
September 28, 2006 at 11:06 am
Cell division, LOL! I love it!
On November 2, 2006 at 3:17 pm A Room of My Own » Throwing Marshmallows, Discussing Sharks, and Baking a Cell Cake said:
November 2, 2006 at 3:17 pm
[…] I would like to tell my fellow blogger at One Room School that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. This is our attempt at replicating her cell cake project. […]
On October 1, 2007 at 5:54 pm Danielle said:
October 1, 2007 at 5:54 pm
how do all do that give me an E-mail on how yall did that or the recipes to it or you can hit me on myspace.com/brownsugar012@hotmail.com
On October 14, 2007 at 11:02 pm Elm Street School said:
October 14, 2007 at 11:02 pm
Thanks for the fantastic idea! Our microscope doesn’t work very well and I have been searching around for a way to make one-celled organisms fun. And…we can add fractions and cooking to the lesson