Kiwi Crate is a subscription box for kids ages 5-8 from the parent company KiwiCo. It arrives every month with all the materials and instructions needed to complete 2-3 crafts centered on a theme, plus additional materials to help educate young learners!
This review is of KiwiCo's Kiwi Crate (for ages 5-8), which costs $23.95 per month.
This box was sent to us at no cost for review. (Check out the review process post to learn more about how we review boxes.)
A Quick Introduction
Like last month, I'll be reviewing this box with my daughter Lorelai by my side. We have long been enjoying Koala Crate, the KiwiCo box for ages 2-4, and Lorelai looks forward to her "yellow box" with great anticipation each month. Lorelai will be 5 this summer, and so we're taking an early start to exploring this next level up. Thanks for joining us!
What's Inside This Box
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The materials included for this month's Kiwi Crate project were topped by two pieces of literature: a detailed instruction booklet for kids and adults to use together, and a magazine/activity book called Explore! As I'm sensing is the norm for this box, this month we created two projects (one is multi-part), and everything we need is included. The theme is Deep-Sea Discovery, with a focus on a creature of the way deep: the anglerfish.
Instructions Booklet
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Of the many things KiwiCo does well, they always nail it in terms of making their instructions booklets age-appropriate. There are detailed, clear directions for the adult to follow, and visuals so that the kids can follow along as well. There are also blurbs that teach introductory engineering and science terms and concepts that are relevant to the projects. One thing I didn't catch last month is that there's an on-theme sticker on the back of the instruction booklet. We loved seeing Steve the kiwi bird in a submarine!
Explore! Magazine
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The Explore! booklet is filled with facts, activities, and additional projects that are on the theme, but for which you'll need to supply your own materials. We realized how much we have yet to discover about the deep sea together, because a lot of the info here was new to us.
Activity 1: Chomping Anglerfish
Part A: Make a big wheel
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The first part of the first project involved creating a wheel to serve as a gear inside our anglerfish machine. As always, the instructions were clear and the materials were quality.
Part B: Build the body
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Once our big wheel was build, we used it to complete the mechanism. A finishing touch, just for style, is a bead strung through a pipe cleaner to represent the bioluminescent light that anglerfish are known for. This project was completely achievable for an almost-five-year-old—my role was to read the directions, steady materials, and oversee alignment efforts. Older participants in the 5-8 age range would be able to do this project more independently.
Once built, the anglerfish is meant to be pushed along a hard, flat surface, and it opens and closes its bottom jaw as it goes.
Part C: Make the prey
Part C of the project is to build the "prey." It entailed sticking stickers to wooden rounds and installing small dowels inside them so that they can stand.
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The activity is to stand up the prey and have the anglerfish come and chomp them. It takes some practice—the anglerfish requires a wide breadth of movement for its jaw to open and close, so it asked of us to toy with the spacing of the prey. Kind of a cool lesson in spacial planning. Our decorative "lightbulb" kept falling out, so we eventually scrapped it.
Activity 2: Submarine Seek-and-Find
The second activity plays with light and dark background to make images "appear."
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We started by using the provided stencil to draw sea creatures on a white sheet of plastic using white-board markers. We also drew some of our own. We then slipped the clear plastic with our illustrations inside the "submarine window" card and used the paper "flashlight" to find our images again. It was exciting for my daughter and it's one you can do again and again. Though, she did have a tricky time not smudging the creatures she had just drawn while inserting the right things in the right places.
Value - Was This Box Worth It?
The Cost: $23.95
Always and forever, yes. This was our second month exploring this box with a child who is a few months shy of the target age group, and she was very capable of doing every build and activity, with a parent's guidance. I love that the mechanical creature this month had a multi-part build and then a game to put it to use, and that the search-and-find activity was a project of a different flavor. We loved learning about deep-sea creatures we hadn't studied before.
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To Wrap Up:
Can you still get this box if you sign up today? It is possible you might get this crate, but it is not a guarantee. From KiwiCo:
Crates are assigned each month based on availability and your crate history - not all subscribers receive the same theme each month.
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