Animal Cell Model

A few years ago we studied anatomy for our homeschool science, and we made a wonderfully complicated edible cell model.  We are reviewing biology this year with the kids, and we reviewed all about animal cells.  To help get it into their heads we made an animal cell cookie model.

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Animal cell cookie model supplies

Sugar cookie (this is the same recipe I used for the cookie model of an atom), chocolate chips, hershey kiss**, CKE Biology*

**this would have been even better if I’d had M&Ms, much sadness

 

How to make an animal cell cookie model

1.  Before you put the cookies on the sheet to bake mix in some chocolate chips.

2.  Once you’ve put the cookies on the sheet, flatten them out a bit, and add a Hershey kiss roughly in the middle.

 

3.  Bake the cookies and wait rather impatiently for them to get out and then cool to be able to touch.

 

Once you’ve put it all together, you can ask questions about the different rolls of the parts.  We talked about how the edge of the cookie represents the cell membrane, (if it was a plant cell I’d use sugar cookies, frost it and put twizzlers around the edge to represent the cell wall).  The cell membrane is much less defined than the cell wall of a plant cell.  The chocolate chips represent the different organelles.  After the fact I realized M&Ms would work so much better because they could represent the many different types and jobs of the organelles.  The Hershey kiss represents the nucleus, yummy that it is.  Finally the cookie itself represents the cytoplasm (isn’t cytoplasm a fun word?  It reminds me of Ectoplasm from Ghostbusters, did you hear Hi-C is bringing back Ecto Cooler?).

 

It was fun, simple, and they remembered it fairly well.

 

More cell models to try

Making a cell model is a fairly popular science activity, so there’s lots of other examples to try.

• jello cell model
• Shrinky Dink cell model
• Pizza cell model
• Candy cell model
• felt cell model
• LEGO animal cell