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Pond Cells Under the Microscope

Grade 6 pond study: microscope observations of Elodea, paramecium, euglena and frog cells show how cell parts work together.

Grade 6ScienceInteractive · Printable

Aligned toMS-LS1-2

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What’s included

Single worksheet
Auto-graded online
1 NGSS standard
Printable answer key
10 questions
Classroom-ready

Details

Format: Interactive · Printable
Grade: Grade 6
Subject: Science
Question types: Fill in the blank, Multiple choice, Matching, Sorting, Short answer

About this worksheet

What students practice

Students use observations to identify the jobs of the nucleus, membrane, cell wall, chloroplasts and mitochondria.
Students model how cell parts work together to keep a cell alive.

How to use

Use after a microscope lab or in place of one; read the observations together and have students mark which parts each organism has before answering.

Curriculum

NGSS standard covered

MS-LS1-2

Model how the parts of a cell, such as the nucleus, cell membrane, chloroplasts and mitochondria, work together.

Preview

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Name Date

Pond Cells Under the Microscope

Model how cell parts work together in pond organisms.

What the class saw

Read the class's pond study and study the tables. Then answer the questions.

A Drop of Willow Pond

Ms. Petrov's sixth graders collected water and plants from Willow Pond behind their school. Back in class they looked at the samples with microscopes at 400× magnification and recorded what they saw in each cell.

A leaf of Elodea, a common pond plant, showed brick-shaped cells lined up in rows. Each cell had a stiff outer wall, a nucleus, and dozens of small green chloroplasts that drifted slowly around the edge of the cell. In five cells the class counted 42, 38, 45, 40 and 35 chloroplasts.

A drop of pond water held two kinds of single-celled organisms. A paramecium, shaped like a slipper, had no cell wall and no chloroplasts. It swam with tiny hairs and swept small green cells into a groove on its side, where they ended up inside it in small round bubbles. A euglena was green with chloroplasts, but it had no cell wall and swam with a whip-like tail. The class also looked at a prepared slide of frog skin, whose cells had a nucleus and a thin membrane but no wall and no chloroplasts. Mitochondria were too small to see clearly with the class microscopes, but the textbook shows them in the cells of all four organisms.

Next, the class added a few drops of salt water to an Elodea leaf. Within minutes, the green contents of each cell shrank away from the cell wall, while the wall kept its brick shape. When they rinsed the leaf with pond water, the contents swelled back to fill the wall. Finally, they set a sprig of Elodea in a tube of pond water under a lamp and counted the gas bubbles rising from its cut stem.