My project needs lab equipment (pipetttes, corn oil, Erlenmeyer flasks, sorting bowls, microscope slides, cell model, and the osmosis/diffusion kit) and a digital camera.
$393 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
The ACCESS Alternative Program at Portland Public Schools serves about 115 Talented and Gifted (TAG) students. The program was created four years ago to better serve the needs of gifted students. I am the science educator for the program and currently my focus is on Life Science for grades 4 through 8.
The ACCESS program is housed in the Sabin Elementary school building. Unfortunately, the building does not have the science lab facilities or equipment that would be available in a middle school or high school. Additionally, as a new school, there is a minimal budget to acquire new science materials. My goal is to provide students with challenging lab activities and hands on science regardless of the available facilities.
In this particular lab activity, the students will be learning about cell structures and function. The lesson will begin with an activity where the students will use eggs, water and oil to observe the self-assembly of phospholipid membranes around oil and water droplets, which shows how easily polar forces help construct then hold together the cell membranes in living organisms. The students will first combine oil and water in the Erlenmeyer flasks, They will then break an egg into the bowl and use the pipettes as a syringe to extract a sample of yoke to add to the flask containing the oil and water.
The students will be conducting observations of these processes and record them digitally with a camera. The digital camera will be used to enhance teaching and learning. First, I will use the camera to take pictures of the lab set up. In this manner, the students will have an image for the correct set up of the materials. A picture is often worth a million words. Second, the digital camera will allow students to document the chemical and physical changes as they occur during the lab. Finally, the camera will be used by students to demonstrate their learning as they are asked to take pictures of types of membranes around them, for example, a picture of a kitchen strainer can be used to symbolize a semi-permeable membrane. This way, the students are demonstrating their knowledge of cell membranes as they apply it to taking pictures.
The students will then have the opportunity to examine a physical model of a cell and observe actual cells on the microscope using the prepared microscope slides provided by the grant.
Finally, the students will use the Osmosis kit to conduct experiments to learn about the transport functions across selectively permeable cell membranes.
The self-assembly of membranes and vesicles plus the function of selectively permeable membranes in this activity provides students with a model for how the earliest cells might have self-assembled to begin the grand voyage of life on Earth.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Dr. Garcia Arriola and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
