Kiwi Crate Subscription Box Review & Coupon – Light & Shadow

Kiwi Crate is a kids’ craft and activity subscription and it comes with everything you need to create 2 excellent crafts. This box is geared for ages 3-7.   Kiwi Crate is very good about, depending on your perspective, either making the kids build their toys, or providing crafts that are fun to play with.  In either case, there is always plenty of opportunity for guided and self-directed exploration – it’s the most popular craft and activity subscription box for kids.

November’s theme was Shadow & Light.  Our projects were flashlight projections and shadow puppets!

Kiwi Crate includes all the supplies you need for two main crafts, plus explore! magazine.  You really need very little from home to do the crafts.  Usually, you only need a pair of scissors (which is sent to you with a new subscription!), as was the case with this month’s crate.  When necessary, the crate includes self-adhesive items or glue/glue dots for the crafts.  

Each issue of explore! magazine  features a short comic, experiments and puzzles or picture or word find type games.  This month had the usual “draw it yourself” feature, where your child recreates objects by drawing their component shapes, plus a cool matching game where they have to math a shadow to an object within the scene that would create it.  My son likes to complete the explore! activities cover-to-cover before proceeding to the crafts. Our daughter sneaks the book out first and reads the entire thing.

Every issue of explore! has a comic featuring Steve and his pals going on an adventure that fits this month’s theme. This month they were scaring themselves silly with shadows.  It has additional information and crafts and activities you can complete with household supplies to keep the fun going.

The learning section of this month’s explore! described light, it’s characteristics, and the ways people through the ages have used it to improve their lives.  I was impressed that that the concepts of the speed of light, opacity, translucence, and transparency were all discussed.  Kiwi Crate is great about incorporating useful knowledge and the acquisition of skills into its projects and activities.

The exercises, puzzles, and games in explore! are a great way to get into the theme of the box.  For parents, they are also a great way to keep your child entertained while you peruse the contents of the box and take a peek at the instructions for the crafts (it only takes a peek — they are always very clear and simple)!

There’s always a cut out craft to make at the end of the booklet, too!  This month, the kids were encouraged to make hand shadow puppets, and the magazine included several cut-out accessories to adorn their hands.  There was also a set of instructions fro making a mason jar projector.

As always, we received a cool Steve sticker to add to our collection.  The sticker now appears on the instructions sheet — previously it appeared on a separate coloring and cut-out card.

The fold-out instruction sheet includes an inventory of items, calls out any additional items needed, and also describes messiness and parental involvement levels.

The new style of instruction booklet folds out, so you can lay it on the table.  It is similar to the “blue print” used in Tinker Crate, the engineering-themed box Kiwi produces for slightly older kids.

It includes the instructions for the two crafts.  Usually you can do either craft first, but in this case it was clearly beneficial to prepare the flashlight first so you would be set to go when you made the puppets!

Everything for the flashlight projector apparatus.

The pieces for the shadow puppets, as well as the colorable sheets for the projector.  The brads in the previous picture are used to assemble the puppets.

Some additional materials were included for further exploration.  Transparent, translucent, and opaque sheets, plus some patterned cut-outs, were provided for making additional projector films.

The flashlight included batteries.  It wasn’t overly powerful, but it casts a nice even beam of light.

The puppets were pretty cool — a second popsicle stick allowed the kids to operate the moving parts.

The transparency is about to get devoured by a shadow puppet.

The collection of opaque and translucent/transparent puppets.  The parental involvement in this project was more intense than most, due to the volume of brad-based assembly.

The kids took to the puppets immediately — here we see that the violent storm did not end well for the sailors.

Making the transparent/translucent projector films were the most fun crafting process for us.  The kids got to color them in as they wished, and it was less fussy than the puppet assembly. 

The films fit easily into the mounting tray attached to the flashlight.

The markers provided worked really well — they were dark enough to noticeably color the film and the emitted light, but they were also very translucent, so they didn’t dim the beam.

The projection films made very clear images.  The crate included lots of extra sheets and patterns for making your own creations.

This month’s Kiwi Crate required a little more adult help than usual, but not to a burdensome degree.  The crafts are thematically related, but they tend to emphasize different skills, so the kids get to engage and nurture different interests and aptitudes within the larger theme of the crate — while both projects this month dealt with projected light and shadows, one project had a much more technical and manual assembly, while the other required more coloring and artistic inspiration.  Our kids love Kiwi Crate because it is the best box in the Kiwi family for them both to do (they are four and six).  The activities and instructions are generally very simple, but the kit always includes some factoids and extension activities that keep our older child interested.

Visit Kiwi Crate to subscribe or to find out more about this fantastic kids’ craft subscription box! Use coupon code MS30 to save 30% on your first box of Kiwi Crate (or KiwiCo family subscriptions Tinker Crate, Koala Crate, and Doodle Crate ).