Learning about cells in Minecraft

I’ve been umming and ahhhing about how to teach my children about cells. I know that its going to be boring if we sit down and try and teach them. They won’t take it in. We tried making the cell cakes using sweets for parts and it was fun, but they don’t remember anything. In the end I gave up. I told them to go and find out what an animal cells is and make me a diagram in Minecraft.

They did. Youngest found a picture and made a lovely diagram.

He tried to add all the detail and the make a Minecraft book on each little bit. I applaud his effort. However, when I asked what the bits were he couldn’t remember, he said he was just copying the text over and would learn it later. Instead we sat together and had a discussion on what the main parts of the cell were. For now, I wanted him to learn the basics. That’s the nucleus, the cell membrane, the cytoplasm and how everything else are called organelles. It was pretty simple and we did a diagram that looked a bit like an egg. He could show me what parts they were on his little diagram. The next day he could remember, somehow something stuck.

My eldest also tried to put in extra effort that day. He did a word document where he copied in a load of text explaining in great detail all the little parts. Then he made his diagram.

And he couldn’t remember anything either. Wanted to make a show bless him, but forgot the point. He likes to go big sometimes and will often miss the point of what we’re trying to learn. We sat down together and had the same conversation and the next day he remembered the main points too. I’m not sure if the Minecraft helped, but it certainly was an engaging starting point for them both and they were interested enough to learn what I wanted them to learn.

The next day we looked at some images online of different shaped animal cells and read a book about human cells and how they made up the human body. They were fascinated. We also looked at bacteria an uncomplicated single celled organism. We grew some bacteria on a petri dish and as a start it’s all been rather good and the learning goals have been achieved. Sometimes things work as I planned and sometimes they work in a round about sort of way, but they never work if they aren’t engaged to begin with.