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How to Make Homemade Microscope Slides

August 23, 2017 By Thaleia 1 Comment

Educational Games for 2-8 Year Olds

You know when your budget is tight but you have a desire to teach your children about the microscope what do you do? You make your own homemade microscope slides! I had already swapped some Virtual Assistant work for the microscope so that was a big win for our family to begin with. The Amscope microscope was barely used and came with the charge cable, batteries, dust cover and a box of microscope slides and cover slips!

How to Make Homemade Microscope Slide

Learn how easy it is do DIY your own set of microscope slides! #homeschool #Anatomy #STEM

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I wanted to have something for my children to look at through the micrscope but slide sets that I was looking at cost between $25-$45 for only a dozen or so slides in each set. That’s way out of our current budget so I began to Google how to make your own microscope slides. I came up with a handful of decent websites and even a video or two.

I decided to take some natural items that had been on our nature shelf on our front porch and use those objects to create slides. I found some dandelion fuzz, praying mantis egg sac, and canine hair.

Homemade Microscope Slides Supplies:

microscope slide prep

I gathered my supplies to create the slides: microscope slides, cover slips, clear nail polish, labels, tweezers, pen, black paper plate and clear packaging tape. When I opened the tweezers box from the medicine cabinet I found a dozen or so eyebrow hairs-SCORE! Another item to be made into a slide.

Praying Mantis egg sac on Ball canning lid

I used a box knife to careful cut a very thin layer of praying mantis egg sac. Then I placed a few drops of clear nail polish onto the slide. I used the tweezers to place the egg sac onto the nail polish and then tried to put on a cover slip. The egg sac was too thick and the cover slip broke! I took the pieces and carefully placed in the trash. Then I placed another couple drops of nail polish onto the egg sac to seal it onto the slide.

Homemade Microscope Slides

I moved on to the dandelion fluff and canine hair. Then I realized I could floss my teeth and create a slide for tooth plaque. Then I thought about ear wax since we are studying Anatomy after all! I know that this might be gross to some of you mama’s out there but I am fascinated by all this FREE Science stuff!

I am sure that you will hear more about our homemade microscope slides in upcoming Anatomy posts!

What types of things would your child enjoy looking at if you made some homemade microscope slides?

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Filed Under: Homeschooling Tagged With: Anatomy

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Comments

  1. Caryn says

    June 15, 2018 at 8:15 pm

    I love this!! We picked up a fairly nice school microscope at a garage sale and have looked at buying slides but know that there is so much around us that we can look at that I don’t need to pay for. I never would have thought to use clear polish to seal the slide, brilliant!!! Can’t wait for my kids to start looking for things to look at. Thanks for a the great tips and inspiration.

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