My mother (who's a biochemist) just sent this to my kids for Christmas:

http://www.amazon.com/Molymod-Organ...industrial&ie=UTF8&qid=1420812860&sr=1-1

It's not that expensive, and it comes with a number of diagrams for making common organic molecules. It does have some smaller pieces, but they don't seem that difficult to assemble, once you get used to them. If you check for other Molymod products on Amazon, you'll see that they have kits for inorganic chemicals as well.

...pronounced like the long vowel and first letter of the alphabet...