Middle School Inquiry Lab on Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic Cells

In this lab students will investigate the differences between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells.

Each inquiry lab will contain an essential question that will drive the lesson and make students think. For this lesson, the essential question is:

What is the major difference between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells?

BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND MATERIALS LIST:

Students will begin the lab by reading the essential question and background information. This can be done individually, as lab groups, or as a whole class. If you consider lab groups, you also might include some type of whole class formative checks before digging into the lab.

Materials List:

2 cell images pages
items to create cell models

PROCEDURE:

In this lab, students will sort cell images into prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Hints will be given to help out students who are still having a little trouble classifying the images. Students will then create a cell model of either an animal, plant, or bacteria cell and explain their model through a gallery walk. You might want to decide ahead of time which groups will create an animal, plant, or bacteria cell so that all cells will be represented during the gallery walk.

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to explain the importance of a nucleus and how it is used to determine whether a cell is prokaryotic or eukaryotic.

CHECK FOR UNDERSTANDING:

At this point in the lab, students will be checked for understanding by answering questions about their findings. Here is one that comes with the lab:

Explain how you grouped your images.

CONCLUSION

Students will go back to the essential question and write a CER (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning) to conclude the lab. Once completed, students will reflect back on their learning by answering the following questions:

How did you choose to represent the nucleus or nuclear material of your cell? Why did you make this choice?
What do all the animal and plant cell models have in common compared to the bacteria cell models?

MODIFIED AND INDEPENDENT INQUIRY VERSIONS

All of the Kesler Science inquiry labs come with three different modification levels. Each lab is differentiated using the icons below.

STANDARDS ALIGNMENT

TEKS: 6.12B – Recognize that the presence of a nucleus is a key factor used to determine whether a cell is prokaryotic or eukaryotic.

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Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic Cells Inquiry Lab