For this activity you will need some items found in the kitchen. Gather some table salt, sugar (try sugar in the raw as well as refined white sugar), pepper and any other colorful spices. You may even want to gather a few oats or dried beans such as lentils or black beans to look at.
You may also want to look at some breakfast cereal flakes. Try a few different shapes and sizes.
You will need a low power (stereo) microscope such as the National Optical
446TBL microscope shown below.
Start with the smaller granular items. Turn on the light beneath the stage and sprinkle just a few pieces of sugar on the stage. Start out at 10x magnification and then move up higher to 30x magnification. How do the grains of salt differ from the granules of sugar?
Draw a few images of the differences between the salt and the sugar.
These pictures were captured with the DC5-163 digital microscope. In order to prepare the blood cells, an employee at Microscope World used a clean needle to prick his finger and placed a small drop of blood on a blank glass microscope slide. A cover slip was immediately placed over the small drop of blood and it was given time to dry. While the specimen was drying, the employee used an alcohol swab to clean his pricked finger and put a bandage on it to keep bacteria out it.
These images were captured at 400x magnification. Notice how many cells fill the field of view at 400x magnification! The larger gray areas are air pockets that were caught between the slide and cover slip.
