All people are different -- some have straight hair while others have curly hair, some have bigger ears or smaller noses or longer fingers! Similarly, some people are able to see well when they open their eyes, while others might need a little bit of help in order to see better!

When a person can’t see well, it means their eye or eyes aren’t able to bend and focus light in quite the same way as a person who can see well. This can be caused by different things, such as having an eye that’s a little too long or too short, or when a part of the eye isn’t a perfect circle. – It’s nothing you can tell by looking at a person, but an eye doctor can help to diagnose the problem.

In order to see better, people usually wear glasses. Certain glasses help people who cannot see things that are far away, while other glasses help people who cannot see things that are close up. The glasses work by bending and focusing an image in a way that a person’s eyes cannot. Eye doctors help people to know which kind of glasses will bend and focus light in a way that will fix their problem.

Glasses have been around for a long time. Some of the earliest historical documents that mention glasses go back about 800 years!

Make your own lens!

The clear part of glasses that you look through is called the lens. Depending on a persons vision, some lenses are made to help things look bigger.

You can make your own lens at home!

Get a cup of water, and some old glossy pages from a magazine. Gently place a small drop of water over one of the words on the magazine pages.

What happens? Do you see the way the water bends the words underneath it? It probably makes the letters look bigger! This is the same way that the lenses work in lots of glasses -- they bend an image so that the image can look bigger!