If I had to homeschool on a desert island....

Nevermind the perfect curriculum, the magic math-fact-memorizing trick, or the schedule that somehow makes everything happen. They don't exist. But who cares about them because Santa (well okay Grandpa) brought a Digital Blue USB microscope, and what could be more fun than anything made 200x bigger. If you click around Amazon you'll find a few different versions under slightly different names, and three types of reviews: either "I love it and can't live without it" or "it's junk" or "the guy who says it's junk doesn't know what he's talking about".

Is it a professional quality microscope with everything you'd ever need? Of course not. But you know what? A four year old can use it. It's plastic so when you get frog guts on it you can squirt bleach all over the place. It plugs into the computer so you don't have to squint to see anything and it's easy to point at one thing or another, it takes pictures and movies, and it's super-easy to set up (and leave up!) so you can throw anything under there anytime. I have more pictures of 200x-sized ants than anyone could possibly want.

In deference to the insectophobic or otherwise squeamish, here's a picture of snapdragon seeds instead. Because you know, gigantic ants really aren't everyone's cup of tea. And don't even get me started on frog parts... but oddly enough the kid set really goes for that sort of thing, and if you set them loose with something "icky" and the means to take really really high-magnification pictures of it, you get all kinds of neat stuff, and a whole list of people who refuse to visit your photobucket page just on principle.

Speaking of principles... We don't have any qualms about dissection in general here (although we do generally stick with invertebrates until we get past the "hacking" stage in learning to handle a scalpel), but for anyone who wants the experience and something to throw under the aforementioned microscope without sacrificing animals, flowers make excellent dissection specimens. Lots of parts to look at, no guilt even if you end up chopping the whole thing into tiny bits, and you can get excellent specimens from the clearance table at the local nursery or wherever it is you buy plants. The snapdragon whose seeds are pictured above came from Home Depot and cost a dollar. It looked pretty sad, as plants go (being an annual, and right at the end of its blooming season), but it had both flowers and seed pods to compare, which was really very cool.