Little Passports (USA Edition) is a kids’ educational subscription with crafts and fun activities about the fifty states. This box is designed for children 7-12, but any bright kid 5+ would like it. Your kids will learn about the geography and culture of the United States with the USA Edition. This month, Little Passports sent us the Weather Lab Science Kit to check out, which my kids were super excited about. You can purchase the kit separately for $24.95, or add it on to a subscription, which would make a nice gift.
The science kit contains the materials for three projects: a tornado spinner, an erupting volcano, and making your own snow. It also has three infocards with science facts about the three topics. Sophia, a character from the subscription, makes an appearance, knee-deep in some snow.
The tornado spinner was my favorite because the bottle decoration is so ominous. I hope those farmers have a weather radio. It’s a soap bubble and glitter spinner that makes a cool funnel when you twirl it. There’s some info about the Fujita tornado scale on the back. It would have been cool for it to include a note on why the funnel forms in the bottle, but the kids ran around the house playing “tornado,” so it was a hit anyway.
The volcano kit is your basic vinegar-and-baking-soda bubbler, but what’s cool about this kit is that it includes celluclay and paint to build a good-looking volcano around the chemical reaction. We’re saving this one for a rainy day.
My kids were most excited about making the instant snow, something we don’t see much of around here. The snow is sodium poyacrylate, a super water-absorbing compound found in diapers, among other things. It can absorb 200-300 times its mass in water. Time to make snow!
This was a fun project and very easy for the kids to do with only a little supervision. You just add water in two batches to a teaspoon of the base and watch it get huge. There’s enough base for three good-sized batches of snow, and it lasts forever, basically. It feels wet to the touch because of its water absorption and moves around in a plastic bag in a very convincingly snowlike fashion. You can even stick it in the freezer for colder snow. Three day later, my kids are still playing with it!
The Weather Lab Science Kit was a fun surprise to receive, and we had a great time with it. In the regular Little Passports boxes, Sofia and Sam visit two states and send their “State Adventures” box containing a 32-page activity book, postcards, a pop-out model, and stickers for the Field Guide. We’re all looking forward to finding out where they go next!
Visit Little Passports to subscribe or find out more! Save $15 on annual subscriptions! Use coupon code WELCOME15.
Comments