So this year, we made Cell Cakes instead of Jello Cells.
This is a project that you don't have to encourage the kids with--they want to spend all of their time discussing, planning and creating it. They seem to have an inexhaustible supply of energy for learning about cell anatomy when they are going to be able to eat it!
The criteria for these cakes were:
- Must contain all of the structures that were on the worksheet that I handed to them: (nucleus, golgi body, ER, rough ER, ribosomes, vacuoles, mitochondria, cell membrane and cell wall for plants)
- Must contain a minimum of three additional structures (this requires independent research)
- Labels are clear and legible
- Each structure is easily discernible from the others and looks as much like the real thing as is practicable.
The advantage of the Cell Cake over the Jello Cell:- less messy
- no heating required
- the cakes can be baked at home and brought to school
- more attractive and tastier product
Disadvantage:
- looks (usually) exactly like the diagrams in the text and online, so students don't get a sense of how all cells look slightly different--the ziploc bag animal Jello Cells took care of that.
- no opportunity for sectioning lessons, which was a MAJOR disadvantage
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