🔬 Looking at cheek cells! 🦠

Even though this term our theme is Life's a Stage, Room 4 will still be continuing on our genomics learning topic from last term because we didn't get a chance to cover all of the information about genomics due to our busy schedule. This is why, Room 4 got a chance to look at cheek cells. To help look at the cheek cells properly, we used a few microscopes to help us give our observation more description. We had to go into groups and I was with Bethan and Paikea. 

As always, we sat on the mat and followed instructional video on how to look at a cheek cell. The man who was instructing the video was very specific in what we were doing. What we needed:

-Microscope
-Slide
-Popsical Stick
-Sodium Chloride
-Methylene blue (stain) 

The man in the video said we had to rub the popsical stick gently, but at the same time try to get all those little bits - we were looking for all those dead cells. We didn't have enough slides so only one person from our group had to do it, Bethan Volunteered while I was disgusted by the fact that we had to do it. 

Mrs Stone handed out the slides to each group and we were strictly forbidden to not smear our all over it and hold it by the corners. If we were to smear our hands all over, then we wouldn't be looking at our cheek cells, but our germs and hands. Bethan took the popsical and rubbed it all around one side of her cheek. She went in there! After that, Bethan rubbed the popsical remains onto the slide. I was soooo disgusted.

I then added the sodium chloride which made no change, but when Paikea added the Methylnene Blue it made a quick change. This was to help us look more into the cell in depth. After that we waited for it to dry because we didn't have any covers to look at the cell without it drying.

Once we came back, we all scattered the microscopes we had around the room and carefully examined and observed what we saw. We had different objectives that helped us look closer into the cheek cell. Mrs Stone also gave us paper and we had to actually draw what we see and write an explanation below. Here's mine: