Use kids' love of nature to teach about magnifying glasses. Take your kindergarten students outside. Give each a magnifying glass and set them about exploring. Reassemble and let the kids tell each other about what they saw with their magnifying glasses and what surprised them. To make it more structured, set the lesson up as a scavenger hunt. Have kids find, for example, one rock, one leaf and one blade of grass to bring into the classroom and observe.
You can teach kids about magnifying glasses and help them develop their skills for matching and comparing at the same time. Bring in a variety of small objects, such as buttons, coins, elastics and anything else. Give magnifying glasses to your students and have them find two objects that seem different at first, but that have something in common when looked at closely. Let them come up with their own criteria. A child might, for instance, see that a piece of cloth and an elastic both have rough-looking surfaces.
Counting and numeracy are useful for helping to teach kids about magnifying glasses as well. As a class, discuss different things that would be useful to magnify. Students will come up with all kinds of responses. Direct students to look at a set number of things from the list with a magnifying glass. Another activity is to put very small things on a table and have students use magnifying glasses to count them. You could use grains of sand, salt or sugar, or grains of rice.
Direct students to magnify something at home or in the backyard. Ask students to do a drawing or finger painting based on the object, animal or person. Let them use their imaginations for a different activity, by having students imagine a tiny world of people on any object. Have students pretend to look at this tiny world with a magnifying glass and add what they find to the drawing.