June 2016 Little Thinker Box Subscription Box Review

Little Thinker Box by Kidable Adventures is a preschool subscription box for ages 3-6.  The Little Thinker Box includes four components: Read, Create, Explore and Learn. The Learn component is divided into three different levels: Head Start, PreK and Kindergarten. Choose the level that’s right for your child!

The June theme was Sea Creatures. Cool!

The box is always packed in a really neat manner — the tissue makes for a nice presentation, and the lesson segments are explained well. The attached outline makes it easy to organize the big picture of what you’ll cover each month: reading, creating, exploring and learning.

By breaking up the theme into four components, Little Thinker Box makes its lessons really accessible and down-to-earth. You could easily do a component per week, or you could work through all of the activities on a rainy weekend.

All the actual instructions plus the parental guidance is included, along with all the supplies! The Read, Create, Explore, and Learn format was designed based on customer and expert feedback.  I like the bit of structure it lends to the boxes — the numerous activities are more manageable conceptualized in smaller bites.

This month, each component arrived in a separate bag. I really liked this! It made it really easy to pick and choose what we were going to do next from among the many activities included in the box.

Read

My son and I both loved reading National Geographic Kids’ “Weird Sea Creatures” ($2.41). There were some really cool critters in there! My son asked a lot of questions as we were reading it together, which is always indicative of a great book. He also loved the jokes contained in the upper right hand corners of some of the pages. After reading through the book a few times, he began to focus on the jokes exclusively.

I love how the folks behind Little Thinker Box include questions to ask  once you’ve finished reading the book with your child! The questions are always listed on the information card. While my son enjoyed answering the questions, I appreciated how they reinforced what he had read.

The enclosed snack didn’t even last through reading time!

Create

This month’s create component included four crafts: making a pipe cleaner sea anemone, a jellyfish, sun catchers and an octopus magnet.

These sun catchers were adorable! My son couldn’t wait to paint them!

After struggling somewhat with spreading the paint, we went back and reread the directions. To paint these, you need to let the paint drip off the tip of the brush as opposed to spreading it around.

Once my son amended his technique, the sun catchers turned out great!

Next, my son made his own sea anemone. He’s been intrigued by these ever since reading about the symbiotic relationship between the sea anemone and the clown fish in the explore component (we frequently do these out of order!). He was excited to make his own!

Lucky for us the pipe cleaners aren’t venomous!

He’s been equally fascinated by jellyfish, so he was excited to make his own.

He loved decorating his plate with eyes and buttons. He struggled somewhat affixing the paperclips to the bottom, but was delighted by the way his creation turned out.

This octopus was a nice respite. It’s very quick, easy and straightforward to construct.

The most challenging part (which really isn’t challenging!) is curling up the pipe cleaners at the end.

My son was really proud of his octopus.

Explore

The Explore segment is always the heart and soul of this box. It encourages creative play.  This month, my son got to pretend he was a snorkeler, go fishing and create multiple underwater scenes with the enclosed toys.

Every snorkeler needs his own mask, snorkel and fins, so my son was delighted that all were included!

I think he’s ready for the real thing!

He also had a lot of fun asking about where each of the undersea creatures lived and which were predators and which were prey.

Living in Texas, my son has a healthy fear of snakes. He decided to construct a water snake with his play dough.

Finally, he had fun fishing. Every time he caught a fish described on the “Did you know?” card, we read about the fish. He was delighted to learn that Dory is actually a blue tang fish.My son really enjoyed learning about all of these creatures! He was fascinated by the symbiotic relationship between the clown fish and the sea anemone, the fact that star fish can regenerate lost arms and the fact that all clownfish are born male but some later become female. Cool!

Learn

The learn segment brings some additional structure to the theme, focusing the kids on school-style activities.  (Although it had been a workbook, due to parent requests, the founder changed the workbook format to a mixture of worksheets and activities.) It’s a great tool for focusing the fun in a way that translates well to a more formal academic setting.

The activities in the box range in difficulty from Headstart to PreK to Kindergarten, so children can pick and choose which activities are best suited to their own developmental needs. Whereas my son has been doing all of the activities for the sake of the review, this month he had his own project that he was eager to return to, so he just did the kindergarten activities. They were really fun! They involved reading sight words, adding and subtracting, counting by fives and tens and finding hidden pictures. Overall, the learn section this month felt as if it were a collection of fun games. We both loved that!

The box also includes a snack to help little ones focus as they’re working their way through this box. Both of my kids loved this month’s selection.

My son and I really enjoy exploring and learning together with the Little Thinker Box every month! It keeps my preschooler engaged and thinking the whole time we work through the four components.  We can’t wait to see what they send out next month!

Visit Little Thinker Box to find out more or to subscribe!