This is my first attempt in the Little Four Eyes for Kids series.  The series is targeted at kids in preschool through kindergarten.  I’d love your feedback!

How do glasses work?

Glasses help people to see better.  Just like some people use a cane or crutches to walk better, and some people wear hearing aids to hear better, some people – including you! – wear glasses to see better.

Some people see things blurry when they aren’t wearing glasses.  Their glasses help them see things more clearly:

Some people see double without glasses.  Their glasses help them see only one of everything:

Some people see things clearly without glasses, but their eyes have to work extra hard.  They might get headaches, or have very tired eyes without glasses.  With glasses, seeing is easier!

→ Try this!

• Take a look around you.  Pay close attention to how things look.  Can you see lots of lines or shapes?
• Now take off your glasses and look at the things you were looking at before.  Do they look different to you?  How do they look?

How do they do that?

Your glasses have different parts to them:

The nosepiece sits on your nose.  It is sometimes called the bridge.  The earpieces go over your ears, they are sometimes called the temples.  Those parts help keep your glasses in the right spot on your face.

• What color are the nosepieces and earpieces on your glasses?

The lenses are the parts of your glasses that do the cool stuff.  You can see when light comes in to your eyes and makes the pictures of what’s around us.  If you need glasses to see better, it’s because light isn’t hitting in quite the right spot on your eye.  The lenses of your glasses will actually bend the light so that it hits just the right spot in your eye.

Want to see your glasses bend the light?

You’ll need:

• A strong flashlight (one with only one bulb)
• A kind of dark room, with a blank wall
• A chair or stool
• Your glasses

Set up:

Put the flashlight on the chair (I used a step stool), and shine it on the wall.  Make sure it’s pointing straight at the wall.

You should see a circle of light on the wall.  That light is coming straight from the flashlight.

Now we’re going to bend some of the light!

Slowly move your glasses in front of the flashlight so some of the light is going through one lens of your glasses.

Look at the circle on the wall now!

It looks different doesn’t it? It’s changed because the lens of your glasses bent some of the light so it hits the wall in a different spot.

Do you know other people with glasses?  You can try doing the same thing with their glasses, too.  Does the circle look the same through their glasses?  Different people have differently shaped lenses in their glasses because everyone’s eyes are different, and they need different lenses to see clearly!  If you try on someone else’s glasses, things probably won’t look as clear to you.  But they look clear to the person who wears those glasses!