Koala Crate Subscription Box Review & Coupon – Dinosaurs!

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 keeping it engaging, fun, and universally-appealing.

This month’s Koala Crate theme was Dinosaurs! 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 the magazine, 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 the story, so it’s fun for everyone! The difficulty level of the imagine! activities seem appropriate for the target audience of 3 to 4-year-olds. Our five-year-old can complete the activities mostly unassisted.

He loves doing the puzzles, and he completes Imagine! cover-to-cover.

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.

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 month Mama Vicky was in town and helped with the box! This is a fantastic subscription box to have handy when a grandparent or other relative is around – it’s so much fun, and you don’t have to think of a thing to do or gather any supplies!

The first thing this team crafted was a fun dino dress-up set! He’s taken it out day after day to play with! It was easy for him to put together with basic assistance, and turned out great!

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. The next activity was Dinosaur Fossils, and big sister got into the fun – this craft involved kneading the air-dry clay, creating a “skeleton” on a card for the impression by sticking them all on in the right spot, and creating the “fossil” by making a relief with the clay.

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. Some are pretend play based, and others are manipulative like this one. It turned out great, and now we know what happens with stray play-doh (the pink streak)!

Finally, there was a rousing game of Dino Match! Two cards, a spinner, and matching disks were included. Players take turns spinning and matching, and there was a teeny brown bag for storing the matching pieces for the next time. Koala Crate is really excellent about including items you can keep and use over and over again for more fun the next time. He won and our family really enjoyed the quality time we spent together with the kids and this box!

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.

As a family of subscriptions, you can really see how Kiwi Crate has grown and added more value to each of their lines – this box was nearly identical to Kiwi Crate 2 years ago, but the board game was an extra. They’re doing a great job adapting and changing activities and crafts for different aged kids.

Have you tried Koala Crate? What did you think of this month’s theme? Use this link to save 30% on your first month of Koala Crate! (or any of the KiwiCo family subscriptions – use this page to find the best box for your little one!).

Visit Koala Crate to subscribe or find out more!