It’s STEM Girl Friday and National Chemistry Week is just around the corner. It’s the perfect time to review the Yellow Scope Science Kit for Girls. I’ve written about this STEM mom-run company in the past. They sent me a kit many months ago, but with two teen boys in the house, I felt I needed a guest reviewer. My friend Rachel Nador, of the super cool cell mosaic project, and her daughter stepped up to the plate. Read on to see why this product earns The Maker Mom seal of approval.
Yellow Scope Science Kit for Girls
When I was asked to review the Yellow Scope Science Kit for Girls, I was excited to get my 8-year-old daughter interested in chemistry, something we haven’t explored much at home. At the same time, I wondered what made a science kit “for girls”– I really didn’t want a kit that told her that mixing glitter into eye shadow made her a chemist. My fears, it turned out, were baseless and we both really enjoyed learning about chemistry with this science kit (and yes, I sheepishly admit that I learned something, too).
The kit comes with three beakers, safety goggles, thermometer, timer, and stir stick, colored tablets, dyes, sodium bicarbonate, citric acid, a votive candle, chalk cloth, white chalk, colored pencils, pencil, and pencil sharpener. Most significant though, is the wonderful lab notebook with various chemistry facts, experiments, and notes to parents. The notebook also includes lots of room for kids to write and draw about their work.
Designed for kids ages 8 and up and there are experiments that require parental help or at least supervision, like anything involving a flame. We also ended up using some simple supplies that we had around our house like dish soap, measuring spoons, etc.
Growing up I thought of chemistry as rigid, having only right and wrong answers and no room for messing up. The Yellow Scope Science Kit for Girls lab book teaches children how to run experiments but also to hypothesize, to question results, to write and draw their observations, and to tweak experiments and run them again. Mistakes, it is emphasized, are part of the process and sometimes lead to wonderful discoveries.
Only 8, my daughter is at the young end of the recommended age range, and she wanted to jump right into the experiments. I read her the first few lab book introduction pages to help her understand the bigger picture. However, once we got started with the first lab, she was hooked. We learned about our first chemical reaction in all its colorful and fizzy glory. She happily wrote and drew her results in the lab book and was on to the next lab and the one after.
I sat with her but was mostly hands-off, other than to keep an eye on the candle and make sure our dog didn’t swipe any of her supplies off of the table. After a good hour of experiments, my 6-year-old son joined us. My daughter proudly showed him some of the things we had learned and then they ran more experiments together.
They were so excited about running experiments that they ran some the next morning too (without my aid or supervision) and I had to tell them multiple times to quit doing chemistry so we could get to school.
So perhaps my only criticism of this kit is that I don’t quite agree with the name– it doesn’t need to be “for girls.” My son will use this kit more when he’s a little older, and he’ll learn from helping his sister now. But I am all for fighting the cultural stereotypes that say science isn’t for girls. Maybe by calling it a kit for girls, it’s really just truncating the message “Science is for everyone, science is for YOU.” And that is a message I want my daughter to hear.
The Yellow Scope Science Kit for Girls sells for $44. You can purchase it on Amazon and help support this blog