May 2016 Little Thinker Box Subscription Box Review

Little Thinker Box by Kidable Adventures 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 May theme was Bugs. Cool!

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

By breaking up the theme into four components, Little Thinker Box makes its lessons really accessible and down-to-earth. You could easily do a component per week, or you could work through all of the activities 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.

This month, each component arrived in a separate bag. I really liked this! It made it really easy to pick and choose what we were going to do next from among the many activities included in the box.

Read

I love “Bugs A to Z” ($3.39) so much that I bought it for my son about six months ago! We’ll happily pass this copy along to my son’s nature preschool. We read through it again, though, and my son had lots of questions about the different bugs included in the book. I love that the more he reads this book, the more questions he asks.

I also love how 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 create component included three crafts: making an insect hanger and a glowbug magnet and decorating a bug wind chime.

This month, my son used some large Crayola markers to color the windchime and didn’t want to stop coloring until he was finished coloring in the entire bug!

Here he is working diligently.

The final product! After pictures, he hung this up in a prominent place on our banister.

He was excited to see Doodlebug Busy Bag-type crafts! This glowbug is pretty cool. It actually glows!

Assembling it was very straightforward–lots of peeling and sticking.

Once he was done, my son added this to our refrigerator collection.

The final create component was assembling this spring bug hanger.

Lining up all of the craft sticks was a little tricky.

The rest of the craft was straightforward, though. My son really liked it!

Explore

The Explore segment is always the heart and soul of this box. It encourages creative play.  This month, my son got to pretend he was a bug, try to catch a bug, find bug erasers and discover the invisible bugs lurking in various habitats using a hidden picture book and flashlight.

To pretend that you’re a bug, you’ll need a proper bug mask. My son was excited to try his hand at another Doodlebug Busy Bag-type craft.

This involved a lot of peeling and sticking.

Once he had his bee mask on, my son buzzed around the living room, pretending to drink nectar and pollinate flowers as he buzzed around. Too cute!

Next, he went outside to try to catch a bug or two. Surprisingly, we didn’t see any on our plants. Win!

We came back inside and sent my husband outside to work his bug-catching magic. When he returned, my son enjoyed studying his bug from all directions!Then I hid a bunch of bug erasers around the house, and my son went out in search of them.

Finally, my son enjoyed discovering which bugs lived where using his flashlight and special hidden pictures book. This was really great!

Learn

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

The activities in the box ranged in difficulty from Headstart to PreK to Kindergarten, so children can pick and choose which activities are best suited to their own developmental needs. Whereas my son has been doing all of the activities for the sake of the review, this month he had his own project that he was eager to return to, so he just did the kindergarten activities. They were really fun! They involved reading sight words, adding and subtracting and playing a memory game. Overall, the learn section this month felt as if it were a collection of fun games. We both loved that!

The box also includes a snack to help little ones focus as they’re working their way through this box. This month’s snack was really yummy! My daughter and I shared some of my son’s snack.

My son and I really enjoy exploring the Little Thinker Box every month! It keeps my preschooler engaged and thinking the whole time we work through the four components.  We can’t wait to see what they send out next month!

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