Koala Crate Subscription Box Review & Coupon – The Wild West!

Koala Crate is a monthly subscription box from KiwiCo for preschoolers ages 3 to 4.  It is educational and always hands-on.  The activities are designed to be developmentally appropriate and enriching while also engaging, fun, and universally appealing.

This month’s Koala Crate theme was The Wild West !  As always, the box comes with all the supplies needed to create a trio of fun, age-appropriate crafts — plus it has a magazine with extra games and activities.

There are two books that will come in your Koala Crate.  Imagine! magazine is “a play and learn magazine” made for you and your preschooler to explore together.  My son loves it!  I like that the instruction booklet is separate from imagine!, so you can preview the activity while your child works on the activities in the booklet.  The difficulty level of the imagine! activities seems appropriate for the target audience of 3 to 4 year olds.

This month’s the was the Wild West!  There’s a fun story to help introduce your child to the theme of the box.  The same group of friendly characters is featured each month, and the familiar faces encourage engagement.

We get the box for our five year old, but our seven year old usually helps him read through the story, so it’s fun for everyone!

Imagine! magazine contains information relevant to the theme so your child learns a bit about the topic while having fun with the craft and play activities.  The information is provided in an age-appropriate format.

Our kids love doing the puzzles, and he completes Imagine! cover-to-cover.  The activities are geared to preschool kids.  Some help is needed with reading the story and the instructions for each activity, but our five year old can complete the activities mostly unassisted.  Activities usually include tracing, matching, picture finds, or word recognition games.  The book also includes instructions for some extension activities you can do at home with commonplace household items.

The instruction booklet is intended for the adult helper and gives detailed instructions for the activity.  It gives an overview of all the items in the crate, the 3 primary activities, the messiness level, and any grownup assistance needed. Every activity tells you the required materials, engagement questions to ask your child, step by step instructions, and play ideas.  Even though most crafts are self-explanatory, they have helpful illustrations and clear instructions, so it’s hard to go wrong.

The activities in a box usually all relate to the same central theme, but they each tend to encourage different types of play and help develop different skills.  Above are all of the included materials for this month’s bandana project.

We started by attaching the foam horseshoe to the plastic plate to make a reusable stamp.

The fold marks on the bandana actually came in handy, creating a 4X4 grid to guide our design.

The paint, cup, foam tamper, and horseshoe stamp parts are used again for the second activity, making bead bags for tossing.

We stamped both sides of each bag, allowing them to dry before doing the second side.  A piece of cardboard inside kept the stamp from bleeding through to the other side.

Our stamped bags.  You can also see from this pic that the table covering was a really good idea — the paint from the bandana project went right through onto the surface below!

The third project was a cool hobby horse for your little cowboy or cowgirl to ride around.  The head is pre-sewn and ready to be stuffed.

Once we stuck the tubes together and slid on the head, we stuffed the cotton batting into the horse.

Then we attached the eyes, mouth, ears, nostrils, and bridle.

Yarn strung through the bridle serves as reins.

Our completed projects!

Getting a quick ride in before school.

We brought the bandana and bean bags down to the bus stop to keep us busy while we waited for the bus!

This Crate is a good example of how Koala Crate treats a theme.  They build multiple activities around it, giving your child lots to do while remaining immersed in the topic.  It makes it easy for caregivers to transition the child from one activity to the next without interruption, but it also creates handy break points for spreading the Crate across a few crafting sessions.  When you are done crafting, your child has always learned something and has fun stuff to play with.  This Crate was really good for spreading out over a few crafting sessions, as it required some drying time for the stamped projects.

Koala Crate is great for preschoolers, as it relies heavily on shape, color, and pattern recognition and other pre-reading skills.  All of the boxes in the KiwiCo family are excellent parent, babysitter or grandparent activity boxes, perfect for adding some structure and fun to quality time with the kids, without any pre-planning hassle.  Our son is 5 now, but he still really enjoys Koala, because he can do the activities himself.

Have you tried Koala Crate? What did you think of this month’s theme? Use code HELLO40 to save 30% on your first box!  (or Kiwi Crate  and the KiwiCo family subscriptions Tinker Crate and Doodle Crate).

Visit Koala Crate to subscribe or find out more!