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!
DEAL: Use this link to save 30% on your first box of Kiwi Crate! (or KiwiCo family subscriptions Tinker Crate, Koala Crate, Atlas Crate, Cricket Crate, and Doodle Crate).
This month’s theme is PENDULUM POWER! Kiwi Crate includes all necessary supplies for the featured activities, plus explore! magazine.
Learn all about pendulum power! Build a linkage system that makes two watercolor birds move, and a game where hungry animals chomp on beads.
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 all three experiments: Pecking Birds, Watercolor Animals, and Eat-y Bead-y Pendulum Game.
The first experiment is Pecking Birds, which consists of 2 parts: Watercolor Resist Birds and Pecking Birds.
Here’s everything that we need for the experiment: paper birds, watercolor paint set, a paintbrush, and a white crayon.
This activity is a bit messy because of the paint. For this part, the kids need to decorate the paper birds using watercolor paint, but the white crayon pattern first drawn on the paper bird will resist the paint and stay white.
For the next part, the kids will be making pecking birds! They’re really excited to see how this experiment will work.
Aside from the completed paper birds, we also got wood bars, plastic tubes, green brads, paper stickers, sticky foam circles, large bead, string, and paper guide.
It’s a good thing that the instructions are illustrated so the kids can easily follow them. Here, the kids connected the wood bars using the green brads.
After linking everything, all they have to do is to connect the string pendulum made from the bead and string, and the paper birds!
Here’s the finished Pecking Birds toy! All they need to do is to swing the pendulum, and see the birds peck inside the food bowl!
The can do so by grabbing the long handle (wood bar A) and moving the linkage back and forth. The engineering behind this experiment is that when the motion of the string pendulum pulls the shorter bar (B), the birds on bars C and D take turns to tip forward and peck!
The next experiment is the Watercolor Animals. For this activity, the crate provided watercolor paper, wiggle eyes, watercolor paint set, crayon, soft rectangles, and green sticky foam. You may get scrap papers and a cup of water from home.
After drawing animal patterns on the watercolor paper, the kids painted the animals, and they even tried to mix colors! And like in the previous activity the watercolor birds, the parts with the crayon markings resist the paint.
This one here, I believe my kids based it on the example animal in the booklet, it looks similar to the alligator.
The third experiment is making a pendulum game using the watercolor animals from the previous activity.
The materials needed for this experiment, aside from the Kiwi Crate box and the completed watercolor animals, include green sticky foam, plastic beads, dowel, sticky foam rectangles, cardboard box, plastic cover, eraser, scratchy rectangles, platform, pendulum, paper tray, plastic snaps, and a paper door.
My kids are busy setting up this project. It’s a good thing that the box provided everything that’s needed to materialize this toy. Now, my son is attaching the pendulum before sticking everything in the cardboard box.
Switching the position of the eraser on the pendulum will make it move slower or faster, or how long does the animal’s mouth stayed open.
They can also switch between which animal to feed.
To make it work, they just have to swing the box back and forth and see the animal feed on with the beads!
Here, we can see that the eraser is placed on the lowest part of the pendulum, which makes the period longer, and the animal’s mouth open for a longer time.
Here’s how the toy looks without the beads in, I bet it’s hungry!
Now, we just have to swing it back and forth so that the animal can chomp on some plastic beads! You can also try to place the eraser on the upper parts of the pendulum to make the movements faster.
They also included other activities that use blocks or bricks and see how else a pendulum works!
There are lots of uses for pendulum. One is to tell time effectively. The write-up also shows us how clocks evolved throughout the years.
Extension Activities
Every Crate includes extension activities, and for this crate, they included a colored salt art!
The booklet even introduced a fun recipe for drizzled fruit skewers! Fruits drizzled with chocolate never goes wrong and the kids are all hyped up to try it! 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!
Kiwi Crate is one of the best crates when it comes to fun learning activities for kids! Aside from the main activities, the kids are also excited to try the extension activities, especially the recipe for the month. This is an effective way to introduce the kids to more scientific concepts by literally showing them how they work, it’s easier to understand and grasp on in that case. You can see how eager and determined they are to finish each activity, and how happy and fulfilled they are after. It’s a perfect family bonding activity as well!
Did you enjoy this months activity? Let us know in the comments!
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