HODGDON — Students in Sara McQuarrie’s sixth grade science class at Mill Pond School in Hodgdon have been studying cells. As part of their studies, students wrote an essay about what they had learned. Top honors went to Jeff Wheeler whose essay is printed below.
(Cells are the smallest unit that can perform all life processes.)
By Jeff Wheeler
I am going to jump into an animal cell with my shrink ray suit. I just push a button and — there I am miniscule. Great, I see an animal cell. Now that I’m this small, the cells look huge!
I see an opening in a cell membrane. The cell membrane is the membrane that protects the cell and lets the food, oxygen and water in and out. It looks like a screen, keeping the bad stuff out and the good stuff free to go.
Now that I’m through, I see the cytoplasm washing around the cell. The cytoplasm is the liquid in the cell. Cytoplasm keeps the cell from collapsing. As the cytoplasm whips me about, I get a glance at a mitochondria. The mitochondrion is zapping all parts of the cell giving it enough energy to do its job.
I also see a lysosome getting some waste stuck to the cell membrane. A lysosome cleans the waste up around the cell.
The cytoplasm stops at a huge circle. I go to the circle close enough to tell that it is a nucleus. The nucleus is reporting to a lysosome. The nucleus give the organelles orders and tells them what to do.
The nucleus talks to me and says, “Hello. I have never seen such an organelle such as you before.”
“Well, I’m not really an organelle,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t be mad.
“You’re not!”
“Well … no.”
“Well, what are you then?”
“I’m human. I came down to see your cell and how it works.”
“Oh, well come right this way. We never get human visitors. It sure would be nice to have more so eager to learn about our wonderful cell.”
“Sure…”
“Over here are the ribosome’s sections,” he explains. “The ribosomes are cooking some protein for the rough endoplasmic reticulum (RER). The RER wait patiently for the ribosomes so they can ship it to the soft endoplasmic reticulum. Once the soft endoplasmic reticulums have it, they give it to the golgi bodies so they can package it. Once the protein is packaged, the vesicles detach from the golgi bodies with the protein and transport it outside the cell.”
This is how all the organelles work and what they do.
