Animal Cell Model

Tonight, we made a (simplified) model of an animal cell. Why? Because parts of an animal cell is one of this week's Classical Conversations questions, and how do you get a four year old interested in vocabulary like "cell membrane"? You let her get one of these...

We walked to a specialty candy store that sells candy by weight, and picked out a few items (like the above gummy snake) to represent cell parts. (The gummy snake was our cell membrane.)

The base of our cell model was brownie, because I had a box of brownie mix on hand.

My daughter frosted it with buttercream "cytoplasm."

She picked out a green gumdrop nucleus.

(She wanted all the cell parts to be green. I had to talk her out of that idea.)

We used this for our Golgi bodies.

Animal-Cell-Model-Hack: I stuck a small piece of uncooked fettuccine through the sour rainbow ribbon candy to get it to stay folded like that. Necessity is the mother of invention.

We used gummy brains for mitochondria.

Lastly, we used four berry blue Jelly Belly jellybeans for vacuoles.

And after telling me what all the parts were, she got to eat a piece of her model! :)