Looking After Microscopes in a Classroom

If you have a classroom and lots of microscopes then you will be taking care of a lot of equipment – storing it, maintaining it and then bringing it out for your children to use when you have a lesson plan that calls for something to be put under the microscope objective.

The problem is that microscopes are valuable and relatively breakable devices, and that children are not always careful. These are not designed to be particularly resilient, and they have a lot of glass in their design – in the bulb and in the microscope objectives, slides and lenses. This all means that they are prone to getting damaged when lots of children are excitedly pulling them out of the cupboard and that can be quite costly.

Thus if you want to look after your student microscopes you need to think hard about how to take care of them. This will start with how you stack them – make sure that when you put them away you put them in a cupboard somewhere where they are carefully stacked and organized and you can get to them all easily. Do not stack them up and don't cram them in if there is not enough space – request a larger cupboard if needs be. Then when you get the children to remove the microscopes get one or two to hand them out rather than having a free-for-all situation in the cupboard (this prevents arguments too).

When you get your children to use them make sure that you talk them through how to operate them and have them flat on the surface before they start using them. With trinocular microscopes and binocular microscopes you will likely have several children crowding around the same microscope or if the groups are larger they will be taking it in turns. Makes sure then that the microscopes are kept off the edge of the table, and that your groups use an orderly system to prevent fighting.

You should also make sure they are careful putting them away, and remind them all to turn off the lights on your microscopes in order to prevent wearing the battery or the bulb. Microscopes will require some maintenance here too and it is your place to make sure that they get the care and attention they need – however that doesn't mean you can't use your children as your workforce, so try getting them to wipe the objective lens and microscope slides after they have finished using them.

Checking them yourself manually though is also always a good idea and you should take the time and effort to do this every so often before a class begins. Bulbs will wear on their own over time even with the best of care and so these will need to be replaced. Likewise you might find that children are not always as obedient as you might like and so it is a good idea for you to wipe the lenses as well yourself.

Looking after many a