Feb. 7 – Cell Structure

Today we looked at the structure of animal and plant cells.  Here are age a couple typical images of cells showing some important organelles that are are common to most cells

Organelle: a structure within a cell that carries out specific functions.

A typical plant cell.

A typical animal cell.

To help understand organelles and what they do, we compared them to how a city would function.  Here are the comparisons:

Cell	City
Cell membrane	City borders
Cytoplasm	The land in the city where things built
Mitochondria	Power plant (glucose is the fuel)
Ribosomes	Factories
Endoplasmic reticulum	Streets
Vesicles	Packages
Golgi bodies	Post Office
Nucleus	City hall
Vacuoles	Warehouses

We then did a worksheet.  Here is the handout and the solutions:

Handouts:

• Cells and labelling
• Cells and labelling solutions

We ended by watching some videos about the next topic, diffusion!  One example of diffusion is ink in water, such as when an octopus shoots ink at you.  Check out these videos.