Future scientist
Santa gave my daughter a kiddie microscope last December. Proof of the fact that I am a bad/too strict mom, we only got around to opening the darn thing last Saturday night. She was soo excited to play with it, I could barely get her to eat her dinner first before we cracked that thing open.
And the scientistmom in me was so overjoyed because she took to that thing like fish to water. For a toy microscope, there really was a lot of cool stuff that came with it. It had about 3 sample slides that had stained and mounted samples that we initially looked at (mouth smear, paramecium, salt crystal) and some blank slides and cover slips we used to mount our own samples. It also came with non-toxic dyes to help see some specimens clearer, and a pair of tweezers, a scalpel and some swabs ... even some lens cleaning paper! Needless to say, the scalpel was left unopened and put away for safety purposes. There were three sets of objectives on the scope, and for a toy microscope, even I was pleasantly surprised at how good it was (and I use microscopes on a regular basis!). There were even two sources of light (one above the sample, one below the sample). We had a lot of fun switching between the two light sources and seeing how the specimen looked differently depending on what light you used.
I showed her how to properly handle the scope, how to move the stage up and down, and how to correctly focus on something. She immediately got the idea of focusing on things using a lower objective then eventually using higher objectives as the object comes into focus. She even got the hang of switching the objectives herself! She was such a good listener who took what I said to heart!
We basically spent three hours on that darn thing. At the end, we also got to look at a mouth smear from me and virtually every spice in my spice rack. We also looked at some leaves, and even with that dinky toy microscope, we could see the cell walls of the individual cells on the leaves!
She was so amazed when I told her I use those on a regular basis all day. Ironically, this just added one more item to the "my mom is cool" list for her. And of course, this definitely added to the "my daughter is uber cool" list. I just might get another scientist out of her, hehehe.