Koala Crate Subscription Box Review &Coupon – Farm!

This month’s Koala Crate let us use our green thumb!  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 Farm!  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 five year old, but our seven 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. 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.  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.  

Here is an example of one of the activities.  It is a simple trace-the-pathway puzzle, but it also teaches the names various farm animals’ young.

Our son loves solving the puzzles!  The added engagement is great fro pre-readers, and it gives helpers a chance to read aloud the interesting factoids and educational elements in the booklet.

The booklet ends with a do-it-yourself activity — this month, the activity was making veggie stamps!

The second booklet 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 all relate to the same central theme, but they each tend to encourage different types of play and help develop different skills.

Vegetable Garden:  This was such a cute idea — after our older son completed it, our toddler had a blast yanking the vegetables out of the ground!  Thankfully, the garden box portion of the craft came pre-assembled.

After adding the stickers to the side of the garden box, we threaded the beads onto the bent pipe cleaners to create vegetables with stalks.

Since there were two of each type of vegetable, we had a lot of fun playing a version of Memory with the veggies — each player would pull one out and then try to guess the location of the matching veggie.  Sadly, this vegetable garden is not edible.

Barnyard Finger Puppets:  These puppets came with their main body already cut into shape, so it was just a matter of attaching eyes, snouts, etc.

We let him do these completely unassisted — I love the quirky look on the faces of the animals, and I’m glad I resisted the urge to have him make them symmetrical.

Barnyard Tote:  The final project can be used as a standing barn, or it can be folded out to create a barnyard play mat.  Velcro-type dots hold it together, so it can be transformed back and forth endlessly.

A handle attaches to the top, so it also makes a handy tote for hauling around the completed puppets and the vegetables.

The three completed projects can be used together for a grand ole time.  The inside of the barn has a really cool barnyard design to create a play space.

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.

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).