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! :)

Classical Conversations Oral Presentation

This is my four year old practicing her oral presentation about the five kingdoms of living things. Notice that all the images she chose are green (her favorite color) except for the giraffe.

Our First Day of Classical Conversations

Today was Rosh Hashanah, so the district where I work makes it an "unassigned" day, meaning that I got the day off and was able to join my four year old for her first-ever day of Classical Conversations.

One of the things she learned today was how to run under a turning jump rope (not part of the CC curriculum). ;)

In class, they had a drawing lesson. They had to look at the owl and break it down into circles, dots, straight lines, curved lines, and angled lines.

She did such a good job looking closely!

They were introduced to the scientific method, and looked at the parts of a seed. At home, when she was telling our neighbor about her day, she was able to tell about how she made "a hypothesis, which means guess."

They played Jenga to review, using the different colors for different subjects. My daughter's favorite color is green (geography), so whenever it was her turn, they reviewed the Fertile Crescent.

She played in the gym, and then outside, and...

...was so tired that she fell asleep on the bus ride home. It was a good day.