“The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the world of amateur astronomy, you’re never going to be able to get anything near the majesty of images taken by the Hubble space telescope, if that’s what you’re looking for, lower you’re expectations Danny or stay inside on the internet. Nay, the benefit of a home telescope (though teenage boys may disagree) is being able to gaze at the stars and know that is the actual light created on the back of nuclear fusion from those stars, having traveled thousands of light years only to interact with the atoms in your retina, sending a chemical/electric current into your brain where under a majesty of parallel/analog computation it is interpreted as an point of flickering light, you’re hippocampus floods your brain with chemicals that you understand as awe.

Writing and Drawing

If you think buying a kid something to write with as a gift is stupid, YOU’RE STUPID and you don’t understand kids! I love to be so blunt and it’s true. If you think only colorful, flashy, “toys” with no function what-so-ever is the funnest kind of toy, you should do some soul searching. Now of course there is significant benefit to playing with toys, even annoyingly loud ones, and imagination. Studies show when kids make up stories for themselves they grow up to have better math skills. (Causation/correlation unknown to me, it supports my bias so I assume it has to be right). But guess what? Kids love DOING things, including writing, doodling, drawing. If you present a kid with writing in the right light and the right time, you can teach them the entire alphabet in a few days, they have sponge brains. And you should probably start earlier than you’d think, around 6 mo to a year is perfect (though they won’t pick it up so quick at 6 months).

A word of smaw fings

This is a pretty crummy microscope, but its a pretty decent kids toy microscope. If you want to buy your kid a $300 microscope, more power to ya, I just don’t think that’s my target audience. This will do enough, feel real enough, and when your kid breaks it you won’t commit seppuku in shame.

Epic electronics and engineering

If you’re not into electronics, they may seem a little advanced or silly or you might just “not get it”. Doing things with electronics, for some people, are one of those obsessively fun things kids can end up doing that could lead to a career, sometimes without collage of any kind if they’re public enough about their projects. It doesn’t have to be expensive and the internet is rife with information on projects with differing difficulty. Electronics only seem hard when you don’t know, the principles of electronics are really very simple and even a 3 year old can start learning the basics. I’ll rank these kits simplest to more complex and put age recommendations on them so you can kinda get an idea of which one to buy, I’d still play with them all so don’t worry too much about them being too simple. 

How to grow a little green thumb.

Kids love to do things with people they love and admire. There is an evolutionary drive for them to mimic, an emotional NEED. If you garden, this is the perfect thing to keep them entertained. Give them there own little patch of ground (a few feet by a few feet will be plenty) and allow them to try, and succeed or fail, as their own independent person. Let them know you’re available for help and advice, but the fate of their plantings are in their hands.

Or, if you’re not much of a gardener, or don’t have much ground to speak of, growing plants in a window sill is quite educational and even valuable.

There are many things around the house for your kid to plant if their first planting fails and you don’t have seeds. Here is a list of things that will usually sprout.

Spy kids!

When I was a kid there was a company called spy tech. Honestly for most of my childhood they were the coolest thing ever! They had periscopes, big ears… ok that’s all I remember, but it was awesome! Now tech is sooo much better, and MUCH cheaper. With spy tools, chores become missions. Math becomes code-breaking. Your kid leaves you alone with you’re mimosa for hours.

You’re a tool

I’ve always been a fan of age appropriate real tools, but when my daughter sat on my lap and patiently took apart a DVD player at age two (I loosened the scews) while we watched a movie, that belief turned more into a dogma. Not only does it boost a childs confidence to be productively helping their parents, using tools at a young age (with appropriate supervision), is excellent for hand eye coordination. Unfortunately I’ve never found a decent “My First Toolkit” so unless you’ve found one (please leave it in the comments) we’ll have to build out own. Half of having the toolkit is litterally (don’t you hate that… litterally) just to have it while you work on something your kids have their own tools to work with.

Playing Doctor

Playing doctor with your kid is a good way to address concerns and alleviate fears about going to the doctor, and its fun! You can talk about how shots hurt, but only for a little bit, and play giving shots with a syringe. A cheap plastic doctors kit only barely represents the items they’re supposed to be… to an adult, how is a kid whose never seen them supposed to recognize them? They’re going to learn a stethoscope is a cheap piece of plastic that only barely works, if at all.