August 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 August theme was Pirates. 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 The Berenstain Bears Pirate Adventure ($2.67). The story was fun and engaging, and I love how it demonstrated how to play pirates for my son. After reading through the book and working through this month’s activities, he feels prepared to play pirates with his friends at school.

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 three crafts: decorating a treasure chest, coloring in a pirate and creating a floating pirate ship.

Since he loves to color with markers, my son chose to color his pirate first.

He was excited to create a “fancy pirate,” i.e. one that incorporated no black, red or white.

How adorable!

Next, he got to work decorating his treasure chest. He started out using colored pencils, but when he realized the colors didn’t show up well, he asked to switch to paint.

After letting his chest dry overnight, my son woke up the next morning and decorated the chest with jewels. He must have been excited to finish because he woke up really early!

After starting the treasure chest, he got to work on his floating pirate ship.

I helped with the construction of the boat only because I found the directions a bit difficult to decipher. In the end, my son separated all the pieces, and I just played around with them while looking at a picture of the end result to figure out the assembly. Once the boat was assembled, my son happily inserted the dowel and affixed the sail and flag to it.

He couldn’t wait to use it in the bathtub!

Explore

The Explore segment is always the heart and soul of this box for us. It encourages creative play.  This month, my son got to pretend he was a pirate. How fun!

Ahoy ye mateys! There be rough waters ahead!

Once his treasure chest was completely decorated, my son filled it with pirate loot and buried it in the living room.

Next, he drew a map directing me to look under a blanket on the sofa to find it. How fun!

After finding his buried treasure, I buried the treasure again and drew a map to its new location.

After studying the map, my son went to go find it!

He walked the plank and…there it was! He happily shared his loot with his sister.

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, there were a number of activities included for everyone to enjoy. In the first activity, children roll one or two dice and place the corresponding number of pirate coins in the treasure chest. My son loves rolling dice, so he enjoyed this very much.

Next, children moved their bodies according to the directions on the cards.

My son’s favorite move was “walking the plank.” Interestingly, our pirate-themed Little Thinker Box arrived just before our new Mysteries in Time box, which included some tales of real pirates in Elizabethan England. Needless to say, he’s become fascinated by pirates and walking the plank.

The next activity asks kids to go on a scavenger hunt, finding cards in the correct sequence.

We decided to play the game outside. My son had a great time!

The last two activities were kindergarten level math activities.

I liked how the two cards helped to reinforce the idea that addition and subtraction are inverse operations of one another. My son liked playing with his pirate treasure.

Although I had never had pirate booty before, my son was very familiar with it and loved it! Who knew? Anyhow, this was the perfect snack to include with this box!

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.  I liked its emphasis on pretend play this month. I think reading through the Berenstain Bears book really helped my son get a good sense of how a game of pirates could go at school. We can’t wait to see what they send out next month!

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