Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Don't be deterred by the plain packaging-this kit was fun, educational, and well worth the money we spent! This activity kit was purchased for my sons sixth birthday, and I have to say, it did not disappoint! It includes an identification sheet, 2 separately packaged geodes, instructions for opening them, and a ziplock bag of mixed gravel, which includes the specific rocks your child is meant to search for by digging through the "plain" gravel. Though the packaging is not "fancy," the price isn't a ball-buster, and the activity of sorting through gravel to find your rock specimens is actually very creative and educational. My son wouldn't have had nearly as much fun with a pre-labeled kit, and certainly wouldn't have learned what he did about rock and mineral identification. It is very hands on, but can be messy-a lot of dust is created in the shipping process. For my boys, that just makes it more fun (what boy doesn't like a little dust on his hands?). I don't usually mark items as a 5 star, but very improvement would be needed. Namely, I felt that we needed more assistance in specifying each rock in the kit-something along the lines of a short description sheet along with the identification sheet. Also, there are 4 pictures for amethyst. I understand the first two, the first of which is a polished amethyst stone, and the second a rough amethyst. However, the names under the titles are "Amethyst", "Amethyst (again),"Rough Amethyst (which looks so similar to the first option I'm not sure it warrants differentiating), and "Amethyst Cluster". After quite a bit of searching, I decided the "cluster" must have broken, because we didn't receive it. But there was so much amethyst in the kit that it didn't really matter-they got the general idea. I would like to see the "Rough Amethyst" and "Amethyst cluster" replaced two other minerals. Not sure what, but an easy one would be granite (included in a lot of box store gravel since broken granite is useless for any other purpose), and maybe feldspar? I am not an expert and am literally just throwing that out there, but I do feel the "amethyst" identification options are redundant. The only item we were not able to match up was the blue calcite. After multiple online searches, I deducted that the samples given are probably polished calcite, since there were a lot of those. But my son refused to match them up with the picture because "the picture doesn't look like that, mommy". None of these concerns change my review from a four star to a three star. My family had so much fun! And this kit is incredibly educational. They were so thrilled with it that they even pulled out their portable microscope to get a "closer look", which sparked a lot of wonderful questions.