Morph-O-Scopes

The coolest activity set that your grandchildren don't know about

by Phoebe Assenza

Age:	5+	Retail Price: $8+
Available at: oozandoz.com

When we first saw a Morph-O-Scopes kit wrapped in its package, it didn't look like a big deal. Then we gave a few to 5-and-6-year-olds, and the magic happened. Each Morph-O-Scope kit contains 32 large, blank coloring pages with themes such as circus, zoo, and sports, among others; two sheets of reflective Mylar, or "mirror decoder," in this case; and a set of crayons. The shapes on the coloring page are stretched and warped like fun-house images, but are not impossible to decipher. Once the kids finish coloring, they wrap the mirror decoder around a cup and place it in the middle of the page. Their finished work is then displayed on the cup in a compact, non-stretchy form. Kids can also move the cup around to distort the drawings in other ways, and watch them change.

We like these kits because they're inexpensive, simple, and engage kids far longer and more often than your average coloring page. A 16th-century Chinese device called an "anamorphoscope," a curved mirror giving a correct image of a distorted picture, inspired Morph-O-Scopes, and they've endured as a fun, quiet activity for today's kids. Our tester-mom, Page, likes taking them to restaurants with her 5-year-old daughter, Amelia, and tester-dad, Andrew, said his 6-year-old twins wanted to take 21 of them to share with their kindergarten class. If your grandchildren are similarly inspired to be the most popular kids at show-and-tell, there are "Party Packs" available, as well as bulk quantities of mirror decoders.