July 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 July theme was Bees. 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

My son and I both loved reading National Geographic Kids’ “Bees” by Laura Marsh ($3.37). We learned that while many bees are social, most species are actually solitary! As always, my son loved the jokes contained in the upper right hand corner of some of the pages.

I love how the folks behind Little Thinker Box include questions to ask once you’ve finished reading the book with your child! The questions are always listed on the information card. While my son enjoyed answering the questions, I appreciated how they reinforced what he had read.

Create

This month’s create component included two crafts: making bee hive and a bee.

In the first activity, children create a home for social bees.

The only difficulty with this activity is expanding the hive itself.

After I helped him set it up, my son enjoyed decorating the hive with bee stickers very much.

My son was very pleased with how his hive turned out! He enjoyed affixing the bees both to the inside and outside of the hive. Once complete, he hung his new hive near the hive he made a couple of month’s ago in his Green Kid Crafts box.

Next, he got to work making a bee.

He was excited to make a bee. He thought the one in the directions was really cute.

The trickiest parts of this craft for him involved twisting the pipe cleaners. I think the twisting is such a great fine motor activity that I’m going to try to come up with other pipe cleaner twisting activities for us to complete on our own this month. We both loved how his bee turned out!

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 bee. How fun!

Every proper bee needs bee wings and antennae. Lucky for him, Little Thinker Box will have my son buzzing about in no time!

To help transform him into a buzzing bee, Little Thinker Box included a bee vest and a craft to make a set of bee antennae.

More pipe cleaner twisting! My son was eager to try these on.

So cute!

Here he is making his best bee mouth imitation.

The following activity asked the children to pollinate flowers.

Using the pom poms to represent pollen, children moved the pollen from one flower to the others using gator tweezers.

My son enjoyed this very much.Next, the children pretended to drink nectar with the enclosed blow toy.

Using the blow toy to represent the bee’s proboscis, the children extended the proboscis to suck up the yummy nectar.

My son loved this activity! It was the first time he had ever played with a blow toy, and he couldn’t get enough of it!

After completing the activity, he buzzed around the house, sucking nectar from the air. Fun!

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 range 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 originally my son had been doing all of the activities for the sake of the review, over the past few months, he’s been more interested in completing the kindergarten level activities exclusively. To keep it fun for him, that’s what we’ll continue to do. For those who are interested in what the other activities entail, I’ve taken pictures of the activity lists.

This month’s activities included two set of math activities, one addition and one subtraction.

My son loved using the enclosed bee erasers to figure out the answers! Surprisingly, he already has 5+4 memorized, so he chose to skip that equation.

The other two kindergarten level exercises included identifying letter sounds at the end of words and reading and tracing words. Both activities focused on the letter “b.”

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. Both of my kids loved this month’s selection.

My son and I really enjoy exploring and learning together with 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!