Plush Cells

I'm currently taking an instructional planning course for my teaching certificate. My professor is rather childish, great for the elementary ed students, not so much for the secondary. Although, she assures us that high schoolers love crayons too. Besides, she asked had us prepare our intro teaching portfolios with lots of old, ill-prepared, flow charts and diagrams. One of the requirements for the 2-D portfolio was a model of something. Now, one would think that, "Bam! Cell Biology model that's easy and self-explanatory!" Well, yes and no. I had already created a raised foam plant cell for my cover page, and it has to fit into a plastic sleeve to fit into a binder. (See I told you she was loopy!) So, I took my crafty side out to play and made some mitosis pillows!

I lovingly embroidered the name of the stage of mitosis on the back of each appropriate pillow and detailed the front. I used buttons for the chinetochores, the yellow thread coming from them represents the spindle fibers and the blue yarn is none other than the chromosomes! I blanket stitched them together for speed (I procrastinated) but I would much rather sew them up properly like pillows and add a trim to help represent the cell membrane. In the pictures I've placed them in the wrong order (what kind of a science teacher am !?) and I've also omitted telophase although it's my favorite, I love the cleavage furrow! The fun art about these is they can be used to help learn the order of the phases and easily associate them with their proper name. If you understand what mitosis is trying to accomplish then it is easy to put them in the right order, despite my inability to do so for the photos. Ha! Let me show you!