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Activity: Observing Plant Cells (Elodea)
Goals: To use a microscope to observe plant cells.
To recognize the ways in which plant cells and animals cells are different.
Background Information: Three structures make plant cells visibly different from
animal cells. These include the cell wall, a very large vacuole, and chloroplasts. You will
notice these structures immediately when you look at plant cells under the microscope.
Cell walls help a plant cell maintain its shape. The walls also help the plant keep its
structure consistent. If the wind blows, the plant doesn’t droop over, it’s able to bounce
back and stand straight. The cell wall provides elasticity. No matter what happens to the
plant cell, the cell wall maintains its shape. Sometimes the cell inside the wall will
shrink, or get all bloated. The cell wall keeps all the pieces in a specific area.
In plant cells the vacuoles are much larger than in animal cells. When a cell has stopped
growing there is usually one very large vacuole. Sometimes that vacuole can take up
more than half of the cell’s volume. The vacuole holds large amounts of water, food, or
wastes. Vacuoles and the cell wall work together to maintain the box-like shape of the
plant cell.
There are many chloroplasts in a plant cell. Chloroplasts take energy from the sun and
create food. This text was taken from www.biology for kids.com.
Materials: a sample of Elodea (a water plant), blank slide, cover slip, tweezers, scissors,
eyedropper, water
Procedure:
 Create a wet mount using a very small sample of Elodea by carefully cut off
the pointed “growing tip” of an Elodea leaf and placing it on a drop of water
and covering it with a coverslip.
 Beginning with 40X, observe the leaf cells and draw what you see. (You may
have to move your slide around a great deal until you get a group of cells that
can be seen very clearly. This is usually at the thinnest part of the leaf.)
 Continue your observations at 100X and 400X. Draw the specimen at the
magnification you think is best (either 100X or 400X).
 Label the cell wall, cell membrane, a chloroplast, cytoplasm, and the vacuole
on one of the cells you drew at either 100X or 400X.
 Use your textbook as a resource to find the answers to the following
questions. You may need to use the index or glossary in the back of your
textbook. Write in complete sentences.
a. What is a chloroplast and what is its function (job)?
b. What is photosynthesis?
c. What is chlorophyll?
d. How is the vacuole in a plant cell different from a vacuole in
an animal cell?