MASSENA - Remember studying cells as a student?

Too often, the lesson was the mindless exercise of labeling the nucleus and cell membrane on some black-and-white worksheet.

Nightengale Elementary science teacher Melissa McCarthy took a different path. She turned her fifth graders loose. Her assignment was simple—create a model of a plant or animal cell.

How that model took shape was limited only by students’ creativity. They could use any material, such as clay, boxes, cereal, balloons, candy, etc., to build model of a cell. The only requirement was the model had to be three-dimensional and labeled.

Students recently presented their cell models to their classmates. The results were crosses between science lessons and art projects. The models were large and small, colorful and not-so. One student used Legos and another baked a cake.

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