Our Cell Unit Study So Far...

We began our unit study on cells by watching this amazing video.  If you haven't seen The Inner Life of the Cell before, it really will blow your mind.  (The one below has music but there is a version with narration.  We plan to watch it later, once we're more familiar with some of the vocabulary.)

Then we quickly reviewed a book we read last year: Enjoy Your Cells by Fran Balkwill.  (This is a GREAT series, but for some reason the books are getting harder to find!)  Looking through the book one more time refreshed our memories so we could do a KWL chart together.

After we jotted down what we already knew, we wrote down what we wanted to learn about cells.  Our questions were:

What is the largest cell in our bodies?

What is the smallest cell?

What do the different organelles do and how do they do it?

What is the cell membrane made of?

How do cells move?

What the heck is a motor protein? (That big crazy structure in the video above.)

What do microtubules do?

How do cells reproduce? 

We got out the cell models that we made just before the summer break and referred to the organelles as we read this article from The National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Then we watched a couple of BrainPop movies about cells.

We read the first four chapters of Powerful Plant Cells by Rebecca L. Johnson and completed a plant cell labeling sheet from Enchanted Learning.

Super remembered seeing something about a dancing plant, so we searched for it and finally found information about the Desmodium gyrans.

We found three YouTube videos showing the plant moving.  This one is probably the best.

We ended the first day of our study with this fun video.  We have the Here Comes Science DVD-CD and we absolutely love it!

If the neighbors didn't already think we're crazy, I'm sure they do now.  Come on, everybody!  Sing along!  Photosynthesis!  AAAA-AAAAH!