What’s it like to observe specimen under a student microscope and to prepare specimen yourself?
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Lyons Cub received a green Bresser junior student microscope for Easter! After having done Easter crafts, sung Easter songs, and made trips into nature in the past days, we had our relatives over today to go on an Easter egg hunt, and there were a few presents to unwrap, too. Next to a dinosaur and slime toy, Lyons Cub got a microscope, complete with a set of glass slides with prepared specimen and some blank ones to prepare his own specimen. How very interesting for a soon-to-be student who loves biology already! The microscope set came with the following accessories:
- A high-quality microscope with battery-operated LED lighting and a high magnification (up to 1600x);
- Barlow zoom system, which allows continuous zooming;
- 2 wide-field eyepieces: 10x and 20x; 3 lenses: 4x, 10x and 40x; Barlow lens with up to 2x magnification;
- Smartphone adapter to take pictures of the examined objects;
- Dissecting cutlery and specimen (microscope tools; yeast, sea salt, shrimp eggs, shrimp incubator, micro-cut microtome; empty slides and cover glasses; permanent preparations;
- Batteries (3 AA); smartphone adapter;
- Dimensions: 145 x 100 x 290 mm, weight: 1.4 kg, battery operated with 3 x AA batteries (included)
Together with a green Bresser junior student microscope, Lyons Cub also got a book about microscopes (“Microscope. What’s Hidden to the Eye”), of which I read some excerpts to him, so he understood what microscopes are for and what he could do with them. He also got a box with 30 specimen to look at under his microscope. Those specimen are of insects, but we didn’t unpack them yet. Instead, we first used the specimen that came with the microscope for a start. They were samples of plants.
The first specimen we looked at under the microscope were slices of onions. This was also the first object mommy had seen under a microscope in her own biology class in school back then 😉 We saw the separate cells and the nuclei. Lyons Cub learned to use the smallest lens first (4x magnification). After that, he could try out the higher resolutions (10x, 20x, or even 40x). He figured out how to turn the wheel to raise the object table, too. Plus, he understood the three different light settings: 1. light from the top and the bottom, 2. light just from the top, and 3. light just from the bottom. The second setting is for non-transparent items, such as coins. The third setting is for transparent animals and things, such as single-cell organisms. We used the first setting to look at plant slides.
The best was that we were able to attach a cell phone to the microscope in order to take those nice photos. What an interesting science lesson for a grade schooler! In the future, we will go outside to collect our own specimen, and we will also try to hatch the salt water shrimp eggs that came with the package.
In grandma’s kitchen, there are some really cool specimen to observe under the microscope. Lyons Cub got to peek at the following objects:
- Sugar
2. Pepper
3. Curry (the sample was dirty; a little bit of sugar had mingled with it)
4. Paprika
And here is a specimen of Lyons Cub’s kinetic sand from his dinosaur toy:
Finally, here is the empty shell of a sweet water shrimp from our brook:
Just look at the preserved insects in amber we were able to see in fine detail!!