Koala Crate Subscription Box Review & Coupon – Rainbows!

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 Rainbow!  As always, the box comes with all the supplies needed to create a trio of 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 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.

Imagine! magazine 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.

Activities usually include tracing, matching, picture finds, or word recognition games.  The book also includes instructions for some extension activities you can do at home with commonplace household items.

Our kids love doing the puzzles, and he completes Imagine! cover-to-cover.  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 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 all of the included materials for this month’s projects.

Rainbow-dyed Tote Bag:  This craft uses colored tissue as a source of dye, dialing down the messiness factor a bit.

We didn’t take any chances.  We used a plastic wrap covered sheet pan to contain the bag during dyeing.  This worked very well, as it was both waterproof and mobile, allowing us to easily move the project to a safe area for drying.

Our kids are a bit obsessed with Minecraft, and the paper squares seemed all too perfect for creating a pixelated image.  Here is our attempt at a checkerboard patterned creeper face.

The other side of the bag was much more mellow, so we used this side to make our cloudscape.  The clouds were self-adhesive, so this phase of the project was very easy.

Stained Glass Art:  This project used the other half of the tissue squares.  First, we created a silhouetted scene on the adhesive panel.  The back was then filled in with the paper squares.

When held in front of a light source, the paper became translucent, creating a stained-glass effect.

Cloud Pillow:  This little throw pillow is small enough to toss in a bed along with the stuffed animals, use as a throw pillow, take in the car, or even set on a shelf.

The self-adhesive rainbow sections were pre-cut and ready to stack onto the pillow case.

A big pile of cotton roving was included for stuffing the pillow.  A hook-and-loop strip was used to seal it inside.

The completed pillow!

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.  This particular Crate had useful items and decor instead of toys — typically your child would make puppets, a game, props for a make-believe play.

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!