Koala Crate Subscription Box Review & Coupon – Camping!

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 Camping!  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.

The booklet contains information relevant to the theme so your child learns a bit about the topic while having fun with the craft and play activities.  The information is provided in an age-appropriate format.

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.

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 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.

The book includes instructions for some extension activities you can do at home with commonplace household items.  The day after we completed this Koala Crate, I came downstairs and was greeted by a giant chair tent in our living room!

The instruction booklet is intended for the adult helper and gives detailed instructions for the activity.  It 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 in a box usually all relate to the same central theme, but they each tend to encourage different types of play and help develop different skills.  Above are the materials for the first project, the actual campfire.

Next were the pieces for the camp food, the second mini-project.

The marshmallow stick doubled as a flame applicator when constructing our firepit.  The frame of the pit was self-adhesive, so the tendrils of flame could be attached easily without the need for glue or additional tape.

The pit had a nice glow, and the little electric tea candle even has a flicker setting!

Taking a break to toast up some S’mores!

We finished the pit by attaching the grey foam self-adhesive stones.

The kids get a kick out of play food.  They tend to play very nicely together, and it brings out their nurturing side.  In real life, it’s every kid for themself around food… but when the play food comes out, they are suddenly eager to feed everyone else.

The third project was a cool bear backpack.  The pack itself came pre-assembled, and the Crate included all the pre-shaped, self-adhesive felt pieces to create the bear’s features.

The self-adhesive pieces make it easy for the kids to do the project unassisted.  

The pack is the perfect size for playing around the house, and the sturdy canvas is even tough enough to venture outside of the house with (though the felt items may take a beating if used for school or other rough use.

The tummy patch doubles as a small pocket!  This bag makes a super cute carrier for the play food, a favorite stuffed companion, or a camping snack.

All our projects together.  This Crate is a good example of how Koala Crate treats a theme.  They build multiple activities around it, giving your child lots to do while remaining immersed in the topic.  It makes it easy for caregivers to transition the child from one activity to the next without interruption, but it also creates handy break points for spreading the Crate across a few crafting sessions.  When you are done crafting, your child has always learned something and has fun stuff to play with.

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.

Have you tried Koala Crate? What did you think of this month’s theme? Use code MS30 to save 30% on your first box!  (or Kiwi Crate  and the KiwiCo family subscriptions Tinker Crate and Doodle Crate).

Visit Koala Crate to subscribe or find out more!