Koala Crate Review & Coupon – Little Artist

January’s Koala Crate turned a traditionally messy activity into a neatly-contained project.  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 Little Artist!  As always, the box comes with all the supplies needed to create two 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.

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 four year old, but our six year old usually helps him read through the story, so it’s fun for everyone!  The difficulty level of the imagine! activities seems appropriate for the target audience of 3 to 4 year olds.

The activities are geared to preschool kids. There is a comic and a coloring page. We’ve been encouraging our child to color more, as it assists in pre-writing skills.  Some help is needed with reading the story and the instructions for each activity, but our four year old can complete the activities unassisted.  The booklet ends with a do-it-yourself activity — this month suggested making pictures out of modeling clay or Play-Doh.

 Our five year old loves doing the puzzles, and he completes Imagine! cover-to-cover.   Activities usually include tracing, matching, picture finds, or word recognition games.  

The second booklet is the instructions & inspiration book. This gives an overview of all the items in the crate, the 3 primary activities, and the messiness level and required grownup assistance needed.  This month’s activities had the potential to be very messy, but they were designed to minimize the chance for disaster.  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 all relate to the same central theme, but they each tend to encourage different types play and help develop different skills.

Everything needed for our block painting.

We set out some butcher paper to protect our workspace, but the project was actually pretty neat.  Because we were painting specific squares instead of painting freestyle, the painting was performed in a more controlled and deliberate manner.

The result is a Mondrian-style painting.  The tape makes it easy to add structure to the painting, and the artist still gets to design the layout and choose the color scheme.  We had a few drips from overzealous application of paint, but it still turned out very nice!  We added the ribbon and hangtag to the back for display.

Because it’s targeted to a younger audience than the other boxes in the Kiwi family, supplies for the projects are usually prepped for ease of use — gluing and cutting is kept to a minimum with self-adhesive and pre-cut or scored pieces.  The sculpture project used pressured shapes and pre-drilled beads.  We reused the paint tubes pictured above with the block art supplies.

This was a great way to minimize the mess of painting the sculpture, while creating a really cool design.  The beads bounced around in the closed box, picking up paint, coloring themselves and the sculpture pieces (sitting in the bottom of the box) in the process.  Shaking the box was fun, but seeing the result was the best part!

The basic assembly was very easy to do.  Grown-up assistance was helpful for adding a second loop to each pipe cleaner and securing them when finished.

Our completed sculpture.  It’s a bit wild, but we felt like we had to use every piece.  And we did.

Our final project was what was supposed to be the first project — an apron to wear.  We had assumed that we were to use the paint to color the apron itself.  Since we didn’t want to wait for it to dry before proceeding to the other projects, we did it last.  We later discovered that the project is to design the label only (though you could certainly paint the apron, too).

We opted for a nice landscape instead of a traditional name tag.  Now we have quite the outfit for doing all our KiwiCrate family crafts!

I was relieved that this box was less messy than it first appeared.  It took us a little longer than usual to do, since we had to wait for paint to dry before finishing each project.  It was definitely worth the wait –we had so much fun!

Koala Crate is the member of the KiwiCo family geared toward the youngest audience.  It is great for preschoolers, as it relies heavily on shape, color, and pattern recognition and other pre-reading skills.  The kids can enjoy a craft element, a game, and several fun activities in the Imagine! booklet.  Although my son is 5 and enjoys many of the Kiwi Crate activities, but Koala Crate is still the member of the KiwiCo family with which he feels most comfortable.

Visit Koala Crate to subscribe or find out more!  Use code MS30 to save 30% on your first box!  (or Kiwi Crate  and the KiwiCo family subscriptions Tinker Crate and Doodle Crate).