My Little Scientist

I know it probably isn’t wise to buy your child something big like a microscope so close to Christmas and not make it a Christmas gift, but I did it anyway.
Remember a couple of weeks ago when I told you Little Man had a bunch of reasons why he needed to have a new microscope?

Well, he convinced me.  And we went halfsies on it.  So he paid for half and I paid the other half.  And got him a book and some really cool slides.

The choices my son makes for ‘toys’ are such that I could basically home school him in addition to him going to school.  He thinks of learning as ‘fun’ and something you can do no matter where you are.  I love this about my baby!

We ended up deciding on this model for a few reasons, including the fact that it received the best reviews of all the others I had looked at, and the price was not unreasonable.  Toadie thought it was a bit pricy–”Wow, if that’s what ‘My First Microscope’ costs, I hate to see what ‘My Epic Final Microscope’ costs.”  My older son is droll like that.

This is what the microscope looks like:

It’s pretty cool because it magnifies 40x, 100x & 400x.  You can really see down to the cellular level and things look awesome.

It’s easy to learn…Little Man had it learned in about an hour, and manipulates the platform and lenses like a pro.

Did you know that if you look at the back of a penny with a microscope using the right magnification, you can see Lincoln sitting inside the Lincoln Memorial? It’s true!

I also bought him these specimens to look at:

They come two boxes to a set and contain 24 different specimens in each box.  You can buy them seperately, or in a bundle with the microscope (which is what I did.)

Another cool thing about the duo-scope  is that it came with a 50 piece kit to create your own slides.  This is a little advanced for Little Man right now, but his dad (and me too, most likely) will be reading up on how to do it so he can show Little Man how to do it himself this spring or summer.

Lastly, I ordered this book along with everything else:

We haven’t tackled the book yet, but will doing that over Christmas break.

Little Man shows everyone who comes over his microscope and slides, if they’ll look.  I don’t let him harass anyone, but I don’t curb his enthusiasm either.  So far everyone’s been just as fascinated as my son is with the things you can see. 

I’m excited to see the things he’ll do in the future with this equipment.  He begins diving classes in March, so maybe once he starts open water diving, he can look into marine biology in the Great Lakes.  Not a bad hobby for a ten year old, eh?

The mother of a junior scientist,

S.