Posted in My Homeschool FAQs

Talk about a trip down Memory Lane...Long ago in the Summer of 1999, back when I was new to homeschooling and the mother of one child... I stumbled across the coolest site on the internet called Bugscope.  What is Bugscope? 

The Bugscope project is an educational outreach program for K-12 classrooms. The project provides a resource to classrooms so that they may remotely operate a scanning electron microscope to image "bugs" at high magnification. The microscope is remotely controlled in real time from a classroom computer over the Internet using a web browser.

Bugscope provides a state-of-the-art microscope resource for teachers that can be readily integrated into classroom activities. The classroom has ownership of the project - they design their own experiment and provide their own bugs to be imaged in the microscope. The Bugscope project is primarily oriented towards K-12 classrooms and there is no cost to participate in the project.

So you know me, when I see something this cool I don't even hesitate, I apply!  LOL  And sure enough our homeschool group got accepted!  This project was a blast!  Even though it is designed to have several kids working at once on several computers we did it at my home.  We had one computer and the kids took turns.  We met a few weeks earlier and went bug hunting,  Then we shipped our bugs off to the lab.  When our day in the microscope came along we had the kids rotate through 3 groups. (The computer,  the living room watching a video about bugs,and the dining room looking at bugs in microscopes. ) You would be amazed what you could see on this high powered microscope!  Little hairs of a flies eye, claw on a Daddy Longleg...Well you don't have to imagine because HERE are the actual pictures taken of our bugs, by our kids back in 1999!  I was so jazzed when I came across Bugscope again a few days ago!  I had no idea it was still around!  It is so cool they have archives of literally hundreds of schools who have done this project! I had no trouble at all pulling up our homeschool groups pictures!

I think it is sooooo cool that this project is still around.  I am so excited because I of course want to apply again!!! (And now we have 3 computer that are inked together so we can have even more fun!)

These are some of the pictures I had saved to my computer from way back in 1999.

Mouth of a Fruitfly

Claw of a Daddy Longleg

Eyeball of a Fruit Fly

Who knew bugs could be so beautiful?