Kiwi Crate is a kids’ craft and activity subscription that comes with everything you need to complete a great project or two, usually a pair of crafts that can be used as toys or playtime props. The box is geared for ages 5-8, and the projects are always age-appropriate, though some require more parental assistance than others.
Kiwi Crate is the most popular craft and activity subscription box for kids!
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This month’s theme is the PROBABILITY MACHINE! Kiwi Crate includes all necessary supplies for the featured activities, plus explore! magazine.
Learn about probability power with a coin toss experiment. Then engineer a spinning probability machine that gives out random results. Use it to play games, create abstract art, and even find out a superhero animal name.
Explore! Magazine
An issue of explore magazine is included in every Crate. It is full of fun content that brings the project to life. explore! has read, draw, learn, explore, eat, and make designated activities. There is really a lot to look at and read – a comic, puzzles, and games – and it really extends your young one’s engagement with the Crate. Each expands on the theme of the box, whether through factoids, drawing activities, or recipes, but the variation is helpful for engaging different learning styles and interests.
There is always a comic featuring Steve the Kiwi and his pals.
They also include lots of historical and scientific information relating to the current theme.
Kiwi Crate Crafts
The second booklet that comes in every crate is the actual instruction booklet for the crafts, and it often includes additional activities beyond the extension projects included in explore!
Every Kiwi Crate comes with a unique Steve sticker (like your merit badge for completing the box). The first box of an annual subscription includes a poster for displaying your earned stickers.
The booklet contains a list of all supplies they provided for the crafts. It also has a rating of messiness and parental involvement for each activity.
Here’s everything we need for the experiments!
The first experiment is the Chance Experiment, where we’ll need a coin to learn about Probability and Fairness!
The box provided the coin that we’ll be using and it even features Steve the Kiwi, which is the heads part.
The other side of the coin features the KiwiCo branding, and it serves as the tails side.
Aside from the coin, we’ll also need a pencil and a piece of paper to make a table and record our results of how many times the heads or the tails turned. I think we were 6:4, but if we kept on going, we’d get close to a 5:5 ratio!
For the next activity, we are going to build our own Probability Machine!
First, we need to build the wheels using the wood wheels, wheel bodies, blue wheel wraps, balls, and sticky foams. The kids started folding the blue wheel wraps, where the wheel body goes into.
For the rest of the machine, we used the blue box, rubber rings, dowel, bolts, nuts, wood bar, straws, rubber bands, and cardboard squares.
After dropping a ball inside the wheel, they fit the tab into the slots of the wood wheel.
When you pull down on the wood bar and let go, the rubber band snaps it back up, making the wheel spin, and the ball inside the wheel rolls too. When it stops and lands between the fold, it makes the fold point down because of its weight, giving us a side with a word on it.
This is how it looks like, the ball is inside the wheel body before placing the wood wheel on the slots.
The last wheel hasn’t stopped spinning yet, as the first wheel is slowly coming to a stop. The one in the middle was the first one to stop and it landed on the word “Eagle”.
The wheels stopped and they completed this phrase: “The Flying Eagle of Knowledge.” It took some time before the third wheel stopped.
We can also try to swap the wheel wraps! We can use a die wrap and play a game!
Since the kids are the ones who made this project, they can now easily dismantle the machine and change the wrap!
The next activity is making an Abstract Probability Art. For this activity, we are using the Probability Machine with only a single wheel set up.
The box also provided some colorful gel pens and some cards for this activity.
There are several patterns that each die face represents, and when the wheel stopped on a specific face, the kids draw the pattern corresponding to it on their card.
Overlapping the patterns will certainly create beautiful abstract art!
There are other games that we can use the machine with, like an ice cream stack game, or even in rock, paper, scissors!
The box also provided some of the materials we need to play the games, like cones, ice cream scoops, and a rock, paper, scissors wheel wrap!
To win the Ice Cream Stack game, the player must collect all six pieces and build their own ice cream cone, and be the first to finish!
My kids first tried playing the Ice Cream Stack game.
The legend is really helpful as they can easily tell which piece they get when the wheel lands on one of the die faces.
The Probability Machine is really fun to use, and we can also make our own wheel wrap, and use it for other games or activities, as we can easily replace the wraps on the wheels, and put it back together fast.
Extension Activities
Every Crate includes extension activities, and for this crate, they included Ready, Steady, Bingo!
They also included something that we can use for exercise, a dice that can help us move and groove! Another one is a color by numbers game where we can use dice or the probability machine!
The booklet even introduced a fun recipe for waffles with a chance of berries which sounds delicious! The other page also features a quiz, and they also encourage your kids to email a letter or picture to Steve, and if it is published, they’ll be sending you a plush kiwi!
Crafts and activities from Kiwi Crate are always fun and enjoyable! The Probability Machine is fantastic and we can use it for more games and activities, aside from those that this crate let us try. My kids were thrilled that they can play Rocks, Paper, and Scissors in another way. The Extension Activities are great too. We definitely love this box, and we can’t wait for the next boxes that will introduce the kids to new concepts! We thought this hands-on introduction to probability was fantastic!
Did you enjoy this months activity? Let us know in the comments!
Visit Kiwi Crate to subscribe or to find out more about this fantastic kids’ craft subscription box!
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