March 2016 Little Thinker Box Subscription Box Review

Kidable Adventures Little Thinker Box 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 March theme was Planes. I was delighted to see this box arrive along with April’s Doodlebugs Busy Bags. For the past month, my son has been asking me nonstop when the next installment of Little Thinker Box would arrive! He clearly loves this subscription!

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

Although the packages no longer come grouped in plastic bags by components, you could still easily do a component per week, or you could work through them all 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.

Read

This Amazing Airplanes book by Tony Mitton ($2.86) was great! My son was especially interested in this book as we returned recently from vacation on an airplane. He had fun learning a lot of new vocabulary (cockpit, flight deck, hold, terminal, etc.). For our upcoming trip, he’ll be an expert!

I also liked that the folks behind Little Thinker Box included some questions to ask once you’ve finished reading the book with your child. The questions were listed on the information card above. While my son enjoyed answering the questions, I appreciated how they reinforced what he read.

Create

This month’s package included two crafts for the kids to make at home: painting a 3-d and a 2-d wooden model airplane with acrylic paint.

I heeded the enclosed advice and covered the table and put my son in a smock. While he enjoyed painting both airplanes, he especially enjoyed the flat plane as he didn’t have to get paint on his fingers trying to hold it steady!

Also, the large flat surface gave him the freedom to experiment with colors. He told me what the results were as he went along: black and white make grey; blue and yellow make green; red and yellow make orange; red and blue make purple. Ever since he started experimenting with color at a camp at our local children’s museum and then again with Green Kid Crafts, my son has been eager to mix colors whenever given the opportunity.

Explore

The Explore segment encourages creative play.  This month, though, it also contained tons of information about how airplanes fly. My son and I both had fun discussing lift, gravity, thrust and drag. Our conversation segued into a discussion of Isaac Newton and his first law of motion.

I loved the enclosed paper airplane directions. This airplane flew really far! That initial success motivated my son to try his hand at making another plane of his own design.

Unfortunately, his didn’t turn out quite so well. We decided to continue talking and thinking about aerodynamics so that he could tweak his design in the future if he wanted to.

Next, my son put together these precut gliders.

He had a lot of fun flying them.

Of all of the planes and gliders he threw, though, the one that worked best was the paper airplane he made according to the template. That plane went really far!

Learn

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

The activities this month included games that required rolling a die, reciting the alphabet, counting, adding, reading, spelling and understanding prepositional phrases. My son had a lot of fun with the activities! I love how The Little Thinker Box originally introduced him to rolling a die, and I’m even more thrilled that he loves every game involving a die that he comes across! The activities in the box ranged in difficulty from Headstart to PreK to Kindergarten, so children could pick and choose which activities were best suited to their own developmental needs. The Little Thinker Box also included a bonus board game this month that reinforced fine motor skills. Overall, the learn section this month felt as if it were a collection of fun games. We both loved that! I hope there are many more dice games in the coming months! They were awesome!

I love this box and all the updates! The new format is solidly organized and well-planned, the included snack is a nice touch, and, most important, my preschooler was engaged and thinking the whole time we were doing the activities.  Although my son and I tried to complete this box quickly for the sake of this review, this box is designed to provide activities over the course of a month. I’m sure that we will continue to learn about airplanes and aerodynamics in the coming years thanks to the fun, engaging introduction we received from Little Thinker Box!

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