All living things, from the tree outside your window, to your pet, to your own body are made of many tiny living cells. Each cell is the smallest ucells of life and is so small a microscope is needed to see it. Believe it or not, the human body is actually made of about 5 trillion cells.
The following activities will help you discover the properties of cells. We hope you enjoy these activities and do them together as a family.
What keeps a cell alive? While cells are the smallest living unit of life, when looking at a cell more closely you realize that it is actually subdivided smaller units. In this activity, you will learn what these units are and what they do.
What is one characteristic that all living things share? In this activity you will find out what that is and examine what makes up a cell.
Have you ever noticed that balloons lose their air over time? Diffusion is defined simply as the movement of things from where they are more concentrated to where they are less concentrated. In this activity, you will observe how food dye diffuses through water of different temperatures.
What is a cell membrane and what does it do? The plasma membrane that surrounds the entire cell. In this activity you will actually get to model something that is very hard to see, even under a microscope!
A hard outer shell surrounds all chicken eggs. But did you know that underneath that shell is a membrane similar to what surrounds cells? In this experiment, we will take advantage of that fact by removing the shell to more closely examine a membrane.
Support for the Center for Nanoscale Science is provided through the NSF Grant DMR-1420620, part of the NSF MRSEC Program. Additional support is provided by Penn State University, Materials Research Institute, and by Pennsylvania Ben Franklin Technology Development Fund.
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