Lesson Four

Today was the last day of the stepping inside the cell project. Its a chance for me to tell the children a bit more about my own research.

I showed them some time-lapse movies of wound healing experiments, the famous movie of the white blood cell chasing a bacteria (worth a look www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnlULOjUhSQ) and another one from my lab of isolated neurons making connections over time.

The children always enjoy watching these and there were plenty of encore cries....

Having talked about my own work we turned to considering how scientists communicate their work to other scientists and the general public. We brainstormed how we communicate and came up with lots of suggestions (many focussed on social media). This discussion was then directed by me towards making posters. I showed the children some posters that my lab has taken to meetings and then told them they were making their own posters.

In the ICT room the children typed up their experiments and then put together posters with printed microscope images that they had taken of pond weed, onion skin or cheek cells.

They produced some really good work , I was very pleased with the posters at the end of the lesson.

I'm hoping we will be able to display a selection in school. See two great examples below

That's the end of Stepping Inside The Cell for 2016 - I'll finish with a quote from one of the year 5 children "this has been great .....I look forward to science now".

Lesson Three

Its been such a busy week I haven't had time to update the blog - so it will be two posts today

First - lesson three - cheek cells

As the children came in today they saw the blank slides on the tables and were really pleased to be making slides again.

They had a great time making slides of their own cheek cells and were so excited to see their own cells on the computer screen. Although as you can see they are much harder to focus on.

Some children seemed to have scraped out half of their cheek whilst others had one or two lonely cells - quite hard to find !

Three weeks in the children are really getting the hang of writing up their experiments too - its really good to see them developing during the project

Lesson Two

Great lesson today -

Introduced the concept of cells using Lego building blocks as an example of how lots of individual pieces come together to make a larger object and told the story of Robert Hooke

Then down to some more practical work - lab coats on and safety glasses
.... the children really enjoyed making the onion skin slides with the extra "danger" of using a dye. And ..... we got to use the microscopes plugged into the school computers - at last !!

Lots of the children were able to make really good comparisons between the pond weed and onion skin. One exclaimed "it looks like a butterfly wing" . I made sure to point out to everyone as they were using the microscopes and snapping pictures that each cell as a big dot in the middle (see one of the images taken by Year 5 below)

At the end of the lesson I introduced some more science words for the children to use in their write up - cell wall, cell membrane and nucleus.

Next week - we will explore the difference between plant and animal cells - using their own cells.
Need to remember to bring home the methylene blue

First Lesson completed !!

So Monday 4th April at 13.30 we started the project. The first lesson started with a Q&A session about being a scientist. The children asked some really good questions like

1. Is detail important ?

2. How do people know you are not just making up your results?

3. How did you become a scientist?

It was great to see them so interested in working as a scientist. I told them all about my journey from a Rugby Primary School to group leader at Kings and showed them photos of me along the way.

I explained that a degree gets you a flat cap whilst a PhD gets you a floppy cap.  

The we got down to some work. We talked about magnification and focus and then I showed them how to make a slide with the pond weed leaf.

All the children managed to make a slide and take images in the microscope - and we got some great descriptions in the science book write up

Snake skin, brick wall , fish scales 

Someone actually managed to see cytoplasmic streaming which was very exciting - so next Monday (11th) we will be progressing to dye with onion skin. 

Hopefully we can repeat the success of lesson 1 .....

One of the images taken by year 5

Today is the first day of the project - I'm going into school early to get all the microscopes set up and make sure everything we need to make the slides is in the classroom. The pond weed arrived in the post from Amazon on Friday and I had a quick test over the weekend to check quality. I used the new digiscope to take images and was pleasantly surprised with the resolution - in fact I got a bit excited and ended up making an onion skin slide too.

Can't wait to get started now !!