Cell Cycle

I mentioned that we spent some time on the cell cycle in the week in review. I decided that it needed its own post.

Metaphase, anaphase, telophase -- what is the order? What do they look like? I ignored any questions on why we need to study this.

How do I make this topic easy to visual and tasty?

Just to give a bit of hands-on experience. I asked J to copy the Cell Cycle.

That did help to get the different phases in order and to begin to understand what is happening in the cell during each phase.

Then to make the activity a bit more tasty we demonstrated the cell cycle on cookies.

I went to the shop near our house delaying a bit of school looking to see what they had that we could ice and decorate. We considered pancakes but would have had to buy two packages. Yes, we can buy pancakes in the store. Then we found a box of cookies (these were called cookies and not biscuits) that had 18 cookies and were reduced so that is what we bought. That is a confession on how I plan school as we are getting ready to do the activity.

J iced the cookies and then began the decorating. I separated the sprinkles into piles of the different colours to make it easier.

Upper left is the Interphase where all the chromosomes are in the middle.

Then begins the four phases of mitosis moving to the right we have prophase where the chromosomes begin to coil up and are composed of two identical sister chromatids. Then it goes to metaphase where all the sister chromatids are lined up in the centre of the spindle (we didn't include the spindle on the cookies). Anaphase, the top right cookie is where the sister chromatids separate into two chromosomes. Telophase shown on the bottom right is where we see cytokinesis beginning.

The last phase is cytokinesis complete is on the bottom left.

We did it. We made studying the cell cycle fun and tasty. I think it was helping when J asked to eat telophase.


Beth