The Magic School Bus Rides Again: Exploring Oceans by Horizon Group USA, Homeschool STEM Kits for Kids, Includes Hands-On Educational Manual, Collector Cards, Sea Shells, Game Cards, Sea Salts & More

I bought this kit for my daughter's 10th birthday. She's above average in intelligence, and she thoroughly enjoyed this kit. I think the age range on this product is appropriate. It's simple enough for younger kids to do with help, and has enough of a "wow" factor for older kids to enjoy. The kit comes with a guide, which walks kids through several learning activities and experiments. The first activities are simple (reading volcano and earth science facts, and matching description stickers to the headers in the booklet) but effective. We did these on the first day, learning our background material and finishing up by painting our volcano. The volcano is a thin, black plastic cone with rivulets molded into it, that you can paint to look like a volcano. There is a cheap water-based paint palette included for this. My daughter half-heartedly spent 15 minutes on this, and told me it was too tedious. Children who are more artistically-inclined would probably enjoy this part more than she did. The next day, once the paint was dry, we were ready to make our volcano erupt. You'll need to supply water, baking soda, vinegar, baking powder, and lemon juice to do all the variations. From this point on, the experiments are all about acids and bases. I appreciated the fact that the child is invited to use trial and error to determine which proportions of baking soda, vinegar, and water produce the best results. My daughter enjoyed wearing the safety goggles and using the test tubes, pipette, and measuring cups to make chemical reactions (just like a real scientist), and recording her results in the lab booklet. We got some good reactions--nothing too crazy, we didn't need a mop but we did need to put down some paper towels quickly. If your kiddoes are just looking for dramatic, foamy explosions, this kit is probably way too low-key. We learned a little about volcanoes, a little about pH, and spent a couple of cool "unplugged" hours together. All in all, definitely worth the money. I plan to buy other kits in this series.

I am a former teacher and current homeschool educator. I am very picky about science kits and generally most fall short of my expectations. This kit, however, is a wonderful jumping off point for an inquiry into dinosaurs. This kit used hands on activities to teach about the different types of fossils, carnivore and herbivore teeth, the different time periods, habitat, etc. The final project culminated in a 3D dinosaur puzzle to build and paint. The ideas were creative and I appreciate someone else doing the planning, material gathering, prep work for me!Some extension activities we did: made a full sized timeline and the children drew with sharpie and watercolorsd dinos to add to the timeline (simple tutorials can be found on the Art for Kids Hub website), we dissected owl pellets to recreate a paleontologist's thought processes, we printed a life sized Triceratops footprint and discussed perimeter, surface area and measuring, I drove my car at 15 mph and my son chased it to experience in a concrete way the speed of a T-rex, we measured dinosaur sizes on the wall and floor and marked them with tape, we made dino eggs out of paper mache, designed dino habitats/diorama for our Schleich dinos with materials from the dollar store, talked about ecosystems and food chains, learned about Mary Anning and sang "She Sells Seashells," etc etc.Have fun with your dino kit and enjoy learning with your child!

This is a great way to introduce elementary aged kids to microbiology. The agar you get is indeed the real agar used in biology classes, and as long as you follow the very simple instructions you should be able to grow bacteria without any issues. They also include several simple yeast experiments and all of the materials required that arent basic pantry staples are supplied. They even provide data tables to help your young scientist collect data. The only improvement that I would suggest would be allowing your child to come up with an open-ended question to test. We skipped one of the given experiments and came up with our own experiment using the materials provided. Overall, this is a great kit for the price and your kids will be so excited about culturing bacteria. This is also great for kids who need some motivation to wash their hands!