Students, in the School for the Blind, have been getting their hands on the science of cells in a tasty way. After learning cell structures and functions, each student built a cell model from different types of candies. The students began with frosting as cytoplasm spread over a paper plate, then surrounded the border with Twizzlers licorice ropes to represent the plasma membrane. The open, cream-sided half of an Oreo cookie served as a nucleus with an M&M as the nucleolus. Jelly beans were placed as mitochondria, Sweet-Tart ropes arranged as the Golgi Apparatus, round, hard candies were placed as lysosomes, and sprinkles were scattered throughout the cytoplasm as ribosomes. A strip of Twizzlers was used as the endoplasmic reticulum, and also to create empty spaces to represent vacuoles. The students included a braille or print key to show which candies represented each cell structure. The activity was a fun, engaging, and best of all, delicious way to close out the unit!
