Christmas Gifts for the Budding Scientist
Is there a budding young scientist or engineer in your home? Do you laugh or smile to yourself when it comes to their ideas and questions? Do you dismiss this as thoughts born of youth? You really shouldn’t. While adults have extensive experience to taint their thoughts, the young have unique thoughts and ideas that are not tampered by responsibilities or rigid educational lines. If you think differently, just consider a child’s drawing.
When children are very young and they draw pictures, they draw out the sun and birds. As they get older, someone tries to help them out by showing them how to put the sun in the corner with straight lines for rays and how to use an “M” to draw a bird in flight. This is not a favor to the child. It limits their creativity in order to create a faster process. This same thing happens with young scientists and inventors.
If you want to cultivate this need for information and experimentation in your child, buy him or her the supplies they need for Christmas. Archival pens are a great place to start, but nothing goes as well with archival pens as authentic research notebooks. These items are going to cost a bit more than items that are not made for research tools, but they also stand the test of time, quite literally.
These pens don’t bleed into paper or fade out, over time, like most pens do, and the notebooks are made to last and to be used to categorize data of all sorts. If you want your child to take their interests seriously and use them in the future, don’t you think you should start taking them seriously, as well? Or, you could just buy them another video game for Christmas and watch him or her turn into a television zombie with no original thoughts.