Can you Dig It? We did, and it was FUN: Review of National Geographic Mega Gemstone Dig Kit

This is a review that I actually wrote quite a long time ago, but I decided I am going to go ahead and publish it now. It is for the National Geographic Mega Gemstone Mining Kit. 

This is the kit. Here's the rundown of it: 

• DISCOVER CRYSTAL TREASURES and give your child the thrill of digging in a real gem mine
• FIND 15 AMAZING GEMSTONES including pyrite, amethyst, tiger’s eye, fluorite, quartz, obsidian, aventurine and more
• EVERYTHING YOU NEED including a dig brick, chisel, brush and magnifying glass to keep kids digging for hours
• 16-PAGE, FULL-COLOR LEARNING GUIDE illustrates how gemstones are formed and mined and helps young scientists identify each specimen as it’s discovered

I bought this kit for Froot Loop, even though he’s probably too young for it. He loves rocks and loves digging, and we did a smaller rock excavation kit together that had only two stones in it and he really enjoyed it. This one was a little too much for him. I think it was too big and took too long for his four year old brain, but I enjoyed doing it too! 

The gemstone mining kit came with the clay block, a brush, a chisel tool, a little magnifying glass, and a gemstone learning guide.

The block is pretty difficult to chisel away and scrape away at. I had a small blister on my finger when we were finished with it. The area with the purple stone painted on it was especially difficult to dig at. We found that if we turned the whole block upside down and used the chisel to chip away at the bottom, it was much easier. We finally got into the groove with me using the chisel tool and Froot Loop using the brush. Then he got distracted by the magnifying glass and didn't want to help me any more. That was fine. He was still learning! 

The gemstones come out covered in clay of course. The brush helps clean them off. 
The other downside is that the clay gets everywhere. Seriously, everywhere. It's easy enough to clean up but if you can do this project outside, I highly recommend it. The little brush included doesn't do much to clean the stones. We used an old toothbrush under running water to clean them off and that worked exceptionally well.

The mega gemstone learning guide that came with it was kind of a bummer because there are 15 stones in the kit and only 15 pages in the guide, so, we knew what gemstones we were going to get before we even started. Each page shows you a picture of the gemstone with a couple of sentences about each stone. In our kit, and I'd imagine every kit, is a geode, pyrite, a quartz crystal, Tigers eye, aragonite, amethyst, fluorite, hematite, rose quartz, snowflake obsidian, aventurine, sodalite, agate, red jasper, and desert rose. Overall, this was a fun project to do with Froot Loop. It took several hours and many many breaks to do other things. The magnifying glass isn't all that great but is decent enough for a small kids kit. The chisel could also be a little bigger, but I did like that it had two different sides... A flat one and an angled one.

Perhaps this kit would be a little better if it came with a better magnifying glass, chisel, and a pair of goggles, but I’d imagine that would raise the price significantly. Also, the company sells a lot of different excavation kits, so if they included those items with every kit, the magnifying glasses, chisels, and goggles would pile up. Maybe they should make a excavation kit they can sell separately so that parents only need to buy one of those (optional), but then still have the smaller tools in each box. 

Froot Loop has the stones sitting on a high shelf in his room in a display case that I made for him. This way he can look at them but not play with them and lose them. 

I think I will wait until he’s quite a bit older before doing any more of these excavation kits. He simply doesn’t have the skill or the patience to do them yet at 4 years old!

Do your kids like to dig?