KiwiCo Make-And-Play Fort Review – Light-Up Lantern

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KiwiCo, home to Tinker Crate and other STEM subscriptions for kids, has a new Make-And-Play Fort Pack!  There are 3 crates available, Light-Up LanternCannonball Launcher, and Make-and-Play Fort. We’ll be reviewing all three, but this is a review of the Light-Up Lantern! The box costs $22.95.

The KiwiCo Make-And-Play Fort Pack boxes are suitable for ages 5+!

In this box, the kids will learn how to engage in creative pretend play, develop and improve their building and spational reasoning skills.

The box contains everything that we’ll need to build the lantern. The box contains a wood set, plastic jar, fabric flames, pipe cleaners, LED lights, white, brown and green sticky foam sheets, brown foam pieces, and an instruction sheet.

Light-Up Lantern ($22.95)

Puzzle together the pieces of an LED-powered lantern, fit for any budding explorer. Sharpen your spatial reasoning skills while crafting with wood, foam, and fabric.

Each pack contains an illustrated instruction booklet.

The booklet also lists and explains the different materials we’re going to use to build the lantern.

Everything in my box!

This lantern project was inspired by a long bright history of real-life lanterns. The booklet gave us more information about lanterns too.

Here is the 12-piece wood set that will make up most of our lantern’s parts.

Here are the other materials that we need to complete the lantern: sticky foam sheets, pipe cleaners, and a jar.

The first thing that my son worked on is making the lantern’s base.

He thoroughly read the instructions and identified the materials he’ll be needing to complete the base.

My other son also helped his brother in making the lantern’s base. They loved working on this project together!

They’re getting more excited as they see the project being completed! The base I think takes more time to build, so finishing this one off make them feel like they’re almost done with the whole project.

Aside from detailed instructions, you can also make sure if you’re doing it right by using the checkpoints provided in the booklet.

The base and the frame are looking ready for the light-up part! We stopped and checked we did everything right when prompted by the booklet’s checkpoint.

To complete the lantern, we’ll be needing the rest of the materials included in the box, aside from the completed lantern base.

For part B, this is where we are going to use the glass jar.

To make the lantern look real, the box included some LED lights, and for added effect, some fabric flames!

He attached the LED lights first, followed by the flames.

He made sure that the LED lights are in place and secured.

He just needs to attach the jar over the flame and the led light to complete the lantern. It’s like solving a puzzle for him!

It’s finally complete! Time to test this lantern and see how bright it can get!

I love how bright this lantern is! It’s the perfect thing to light up their spacious fort!

The flames look kind of real in the dark too!

The pipe cleaners are used to support the jar that holds the LED lights.

It is also used to secure the handle too.

The booklet lets us know more about the Morse Code!

Morse code is a character encoding scheme used in telecommunication that encodes text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations called dots and dashes or dits and dahs.

My son is so proud of his finished project!

It totally illuminates the inside of their fort.

I also like that the lantern is well-made, and can support itself when placed on higher surfaces.

They can also hang it up too!

Here he is, trying to hang the lantern up on one of the posts of the fort.

I like the crate packs from KiwiCo as they are all related or, if not, has the same concept as the other packs. For the Make-And-Play Fort, this Light-Up Lantern is a perfect inclusion as it can be used to light up the fort that the kids made! My son really had fun playing and building this one, and requires only a little help from his siblings or me, as I let him explore everything by himself! I also love how educational the booklet is, as we gained more knowledge about the history and uses of lanterns, and of course, a bonus lesson about Morse Code too!

Are you getting the KiwiCo Make-And-Play Pack?  Want even more?  You can also subscribe to the regular Kiwi Crate, Koala Crate, Atlas Crate, or Doodle Crate and save 30% on your first month! Just use this link to subscribe!

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