Living/Non-Living: Awakening a Colony

Provide your students with a sample colony (a spoonful of yeast in a plastic egg) of a new life form found on Earth.  The students are responsible for "awakening" this colony and providing it with the necessary materials to sustain it (food, water, shelter, oxygen). 

You may wish to have your students complete this activity following the scientific method.  In which case, they should write down and plan and then proceed to attempt to bring it to life. 

You'll need to provide the following supplies:
--egg with yeast
--Petri dishes
--spoons
--warm water
--sugar
--"decoy" supplies - anything you can think of that your students might want to use - the more you can put out, the better. 

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Is It Living?: Glue Critters

This is a fun demonstration, but it does require some slight of hand, so you'll want to practice a bit before your big performance. 

Set a Petri dish (or another transparent container) filled with water on an overhead projector. 

Place a tube of Duco cement in a brown paper bag. 

Tell the students you're going to release a critter into the Petri dish.  Carefully, squeeze a few small drips of glue into the dish.  Make it look like you're pouring something out of the bag - don't let them see the tube of glue.  Play it up!

After a bit, add some pencil shavings to the dish - the critter will "eat" them. 

What happens if you add a drop of soapy water or dip a bar of soap into the water?

And then for the big question: are the critters alive?  What evidence do you have?  How can you explain it? 

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