Today's Wednesday Workshop hosted 20 kids for free hands-on science at John Muir. Students were able to choose their own activity as usual. Four boys spent the entire hour and a half taking apart an old radio someone had donated to our 'take-apart table'. Some other students continued working on an artistic rendition of the solar system to decorate our wind tube with, some made intricate dolls fashioned from foam, corks and paper. A small group of fifth grade students prepared two slides by peeling off layers an onion & swabbing their cheeks. They then looked at, and photographed both types of cells under the microscope. They were able to see that the plant cells have more rectangular shapes (thanks to their cell walls) while the animal cells looked more like 'blobs' (with only cell membranes - no walls). The plant cell pictures above turned out magnificently! Their cheek cell pictures came out a little blurry and you can barely make out one cell in the top left corner of the bottom picture, but we thought the iodine and tooth pick scrapings made for some really interesting art! I'll definitely try this again with methylene blue for the cheek cells & have them identify the similarities as well as the differences.
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