Koala Crate is a monthly subscription box from KiwiCo for preschoolers ages 3 to 5. 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 Baking! 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.
DEAL: 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!).
The instruction booklet is intended for the adult helper and gives detailed instructions for the activity. It lists all the supplies, 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.
A fun story introduces your child to the theme of the box. The same group of friendly characters is featured each month, and the familiar faces encourage engagement.
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 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.
All the materials you’ll need to make this month’s activities!
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.
We started off by making a baker’s hat. Everyone wanted in on this one!!
The next activity involved decorating a cake box with smelly stickers and glitter glue. Our 6 year old (yes he STILL loves this box ❤️) hates messy but loved this activity.
Baby bro will soon take over Koala Crate and has been participating in the crafts! Such a good family time.
The final activity included measuring and reinforcing fractions with these cool measuring cups! 
Our son also ended up exploring what happens when you add glitterglue to water. He was totally fascinated by it. 
This month the box included a bonus set of activities plus watercolors to complete them!
We decided to play with some color mixing.
This was a lot of fun and our kids loved predicting the colors and seeing them mix!
This little baker loved the crafts in this box!
He is using the box to store some precious kindergarten treasures.
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 6 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?
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