Amazon has launched a new STEM Club Toy subscription box! This monthly subscription delivers "handpicked, high-quality Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math toys" to your door for $19.99/month.
There are 3 age range options:
- 3-4-year-olds (counting, building, and cause and effect)
- 5-7 year-olds (hands-on experiments and explorations of electricity, earth science, and simple math)
- 8-13-year-olds (more complex projects and experiments based on principals of physics, chemistry, and engineering)
My Subscription Addiction paid for this box. (Check out the review process post to learn more about how we review boxes.)
This is a review of the 3-4-year-old age range Amazon STEM Club, $19.99/month.
The Subscription Box: Amazon STEM Toy Club
The Cost: $19.99 per month
The Products: Each month you will receive a different, age-appropriate STEM toy.
Ships to: U.S. (free shipping)
Check out all of our Amazon STEM Toy Club reviews and more educational and STEM subscriptions for kids in our subscription box directory!
Keep track of your subscriptions: Add this box to your subscription list or wish list!
We signed up for Amazon's STEM Toy Club subscription as soon as it launched, and this is our second delivery, which arrived in early March. Unlike the Amazon Prime Surprise Sweets box, this is packaged very simply - it looks like any other item we might order from Amazon.
Kids First Automobile Engineer Kit by Thames & Kosmos - Retail $44.99, on Amazon for $33.99
This month's toy is definitely an upgrade from the first month: it's an "engineering kit" with a storybook, in a carrying case!
The kit comes with 70 pieces and instructions to make the 10 different vehicles pictured here.
At this point, my son was literally squealing and jumping up and down to see what this was - he loves cars and blocks!
Everything fits inside the included storage case, which is a huge win, because:
There are a lot of small pieces! We managed not to lose any while we were playing, but this is definitely a toy that (for my kid) requires some adult supervision and clean-up right away.
We love these quirky eyeball pieces too - my son loved saying "eyeball car!" and making them turn in different directions.
Despite some of the pieces being on the small side, they're all really sturdy and went together easily too.
The kit comes with this storybook/manual. It starts off with a note to parents and a list of all the included parts.
The story follows a day in the life with the Omega family, where they need to build different vehicles for each challenge they run into during the day:
We enjoyed reading the story as a standalone activity, too. Given my son's current obsession with cars and trucks and pretty much anything with wheels, he has recently started learning the specific names for different things (like digger, tow truck, dump truck, etc) - so he was really interested in this!
This carrying case is great, too. The handles snap the lid shut so you can keep everything together. (This is a huge improvement over the toy featured last month, which had a ton of pieces in a box with no lid.)
The first vehicle in the story is this minivan!
My son is only 2, so he's too young to put this together by himself. I read the story, then talked through the instructions and then ask him to pick out different pieces for me by asking for the different colored blocks and wheels and eyeballs. So it was still interactive -- and he was excited to see things being put together.
And he happily zoomed the finished car around!
Then he smashed everything (as two-year-olds do), and we spent the next half hour playing with the gear and wheel pieces and putting them together in different ways. This was still really fun for him since he hasn't had any toys where he can build with spinning parts.
Verdict: I'm really happy this month's selection - it's a definite improvement in value and toy quality compared to last month, and I think it should appeal to a wider range of kids. The MSRP is over double the price of the subscription, and while Amazon sells this toy for $33, it's still a win in terms of value too. Once again, I like that this is the kind of toy that can be used in a few different ways: you can follow the instructions and story, learn about colors and shapes for younger kids, or let them get creative and build things on their own. This one was a win for us and I think it'll get a lot of good use in the next few years.
What do you think of the second month of the Amazon STEM Club Toy subscription box?
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