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, Pre-K, and Kindergarten. Choose the level that’s right for your child!
The November theme was Dinosaurs. 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 enjoyed reading The Berenstain Bears’ Dinosaur Dig ($3.75). Truth be told, my son looks forward to receiving Little Thinker Box each month in no small part because he loves the included books. The Berenstain Bears books are always a lot of fun, and the National Geographic Kids books contain jokes, which he loves. This month, I tried to get my daughter involved in the Little Thinker Box, but my son would have none of it. This is his box, his FAVORITE box, and he was not about to hand it over to his sister.
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 asked children to complete a sand art project, color in wooden dinosaur ornaments, and create a mosaic dinosaur scene.
My son enjoys sand art very much. Ever since his first introduction to sand art through subscription boxes, he can’t seem to get enough exposure to the craft. He was thrilled to use it to create a flying dinosaur scene.
Since we received two wooden dinosaur ornaments to decorate, I convinced my son to allow my daughter to decorate one of them.
Whereas my daughter enjoyed making marks on hers, my son layered his with color. We added both ornaments to our Christmas tree.
Next, my son got to work on his mosaic masterpiece. Once he had affixed all of the shapes to the background, he decorated the scene with the enclosed stick of glitter glue.
This sticker activity book was an added bonus! I didn’t see mention of it anywhere, so I told my kids they could play with it once we were done with the rest of the box. They couldn’t wait to get started!
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 to be a dinosaur!
My son enjoyed donning his dinosaur mask and rolling a die to act out different things a dinosaur might do.
Next, we played dinosaur detective! We had a lot of fun taking turns making dinosaur footprints in the enclosed playdough and figuring out which dinosaur was responsible for the tracks.
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 Pre-K to Kindergarten, so children can pick and choose which activities are best suited to their own developmental needs.
This month, my son completed the All activities as well as the Kindergarten activities. He enjoyed using his “dinosaur bones” to create copies of the enclosed shapes.
He also enjoyed using the bones to create letters and spell words.
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 kindergarten activities reinforced reading, math, and fine motor skills.
My son enjoyed spelling words with his dinosaur bones.
He also enjoyed figuring out math problems with the help of the enclosed dinosaur stickers.
Finally, he enjoyed rolling the dice and picking out the corresponding number of dinosaur bones with his alligator tweezers. Fun!
Each month, Little Thinker Box includes a small snack for kids to munch on while completing their boxes. This month’s selection was a big hit. My son loved his Cheez Its!
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. My son loved learning about dinosaurs this month. We can’t wait to see what they send out next month!
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