Review on 🐻 Dancing Bear Collection: Interactive Learning for Identification and Education by Christopher Smith

Don't let the plain packaging put you off - this set was fun, educational and worth the money! Bought this activity set for my son's 6th birthday and I have to say it didn't disappoint! It includes an identification sheet, 2 individually wrapped geodes, opening instructions, and a zip-lock mixed gravel bag containing the specific stones your child should be looking for when digging in "regular" gravel. "Fancy", the price is not a headache, and sorting gravel to find rock samples is actually very creative and educational. My son wouldn't have had as much fun with a pre-labeled kit and he certainly wouldn't have known what he was doing with rock and mineral identification. This is very convenient, but can be messy - a lot of dust is generated during the delivery process. It's just more fun for my boys (what boy doesn't like a little dust on their hands?). I don't usually give items 5 stars, but they need a lot of improvement. In particular, I felt that we needed more help identifying each stone in the set - something like a short description sheet along with an identification sheet. There are also 4 images for Amethyst. I understand the first two, the first is a polished amethyst and the second is a rough amethyst. However, the titles among the titles are: Amethyst, Amethyst (again), Raw Amethyst (which looks so similar to the first option that I'm not sure it deserves a distinction), and Amethyst Cluster. After some searching I decided that the "cluster" was defective because we didn't get it. But there were so many amethysts in the set that it didn't really matter - they got the general idea. I want Rough Amethyst and Bunch of Amethyst to replace the other two minerals. Not sure what, but the simplest would be granite (found in many gravel stores as crushed granite is useless for other purposes) and maybe feldspar? I'm not an expert and I'm literally just throwing this in, but I feel the "Amethyst" identification options are redundant. The only element we couldn't bring together was blue calcite. After much research on the internet I came to the conclusion that the given specimens are probably polished calcite as there were a lot of them. But my son refused to match them to the picture because "the picture doesn't look like it mom". None of these considerations changed my rating from four stars to three stars. My family had so much fun! And this set is incredibly educational. They were so excited they even pulled out their portable microscope to "take a closer look," which raised a lot of great questions.