Thing #11

My theme is Plant Cell vs. Animal Cell. Recently, my class learned how to use microscopes and used some plant cells and cheek cells to reenforce the use of the microscope and the difference between plant and animal cells. The pic above is from a plant (Flickr Ah Pao): it's characteristically green due to cholorphyll, rectangular block shaped, and you can even see the cholorplasts.

I think flickr is a great tool, easy to use, and awesome to find royalty-free pics. I wish we could print in color in mass scale so my kiddos could keep these images in their notes. Perhaps the more visual images they see, the better the learning will stick. Putting the plant cell along with this image of a cheek cell (http://www.flickr.com/photos/19877840@N00/2895610842/) below shows a wonderful contrast between these two cell types. Of course, if we had a class website, they could always visit these pics to use as a refresher.