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 GARDEN! 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.
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.
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!).
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.
In addition to the main projects, there are several games and activities in imagine! magazine.
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.
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.
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.
Gardening Apron
OMG this was so cute I could barely stand it. Using the included materials your child laces on the leaves and flowers to the apron. He loves lacing activities and it’s such a great activity for fine motor skills.
It turned out darling and he couldn’t wait to go garden with the little rake and spade. Hours of play out of this so far!
Growing Plant:
For this activity you & your child glue on little tissue paper squares to cardboard leaves, and the entire thing builds up to be a plant!
My son was really into this activity too, helping place all the glue. You might notice that he glued some of the leaves right onto the base, and that was ok with me. It’s perfect however he wanted to do it.
Garden Book:
For this book you read along with your child and you can build the plant you made in the second activity. It’s a fun conversational read and my son enjoyed it.
This was a fantastic box with 3 sturdy crafts – 2 of which are really great to keep a long time! A super value.
Koala Crate is great for preschoolers, as it relies heavily on shape, color, and pattern recognition and other pre-reading skills. There is always some age-appropriate learning, and it really keeps the kids busy. You can do the activities in a single marathon session, but they are also easy to spread out over several days. 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 two and half year old needs some help figuring out what to do, but he can actually do many of the activities without help. Our other son is 6 now and has transitioned to the older boxes, 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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