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The Preschool Box is a a monthly subscription filled with 16+ activities and educational crafts for young children to explore with their parents. Each box in this yearlong subscription brings four weeks worth of games, lessons, and art projects that immerse preschool-aged kids (3-5) in the alphabet and numbers in ways that work their fine motor skills and get their brains going.
The Cost: $42.95 per month + free shipping with annual subscription.
This box was sent to us at no cost for review. (Check out the editorial guidelines to learn more about how we review boxes.)
Meet your reviewers
This box is meant for children ages 3-5, as a way of familiarizing them with letters and numbers prior to entering Kindergarten. My two children bookend this age group — one is is a couple months shy of 3 and in part-time daycare, and the other is on the latter half of age 5 and in Kindergarten now.
This box is better suited to my younger daughter because she hasn't been through preschool, meaning the concepts inside this box are newer to her. She can recite the alphabet up to G and just learned to count to 10. That said, my older daughter was in the room for some of our exploration of this box, and was excited to participate, even though she is most of the way through Kindergarten and is in the early stages of reading and math. It was quite insightful to see how the big sister was empowered to guide her little sibling through many of these activities.
If your child ages out of The Preschool Box
If you have a child in the 5-7 age group, this brand has a box called Lil Readers Book Club. It includes 3 books, plus crafts and comprehension activities. Its cost is also $42.95 per month + free shipping.
What's Inside The Preschool Box?
The Preschool Box arrives in a blue box with a cute little owl printed on the top. When you open it, you'll find a detailed parent guide and activity workbook. Underneath is a mess of supplies for the enclosed activities, and on the bottom is a file folder with the print-outs needed. Some kids subscriptions are conducive to open with your child sitting alongside you, but for this one I recommend the adult fetches it from the mail and spends a little time with the parent guide before roping your child in. More on that just below.
Parent Guide & Activity Workbook
You'll see in the photos above that the Parent Guide begins with a welcome note, then dedicates one page to each week's activities. Week 1 focuses on the letter A and has 7 associated activities, meaning you could do one each day of the week or stack them. The activities include crafts, a scavenger hunt, creating a short book out of provided print-outs, and two pages of the workbook (which is at the back of this guide). The following weeks look similar.
While The Preschool Box doesn't market itself as an intro to homeschooling, it could be considered a supplementary tool for home early education, and to share my own personal view, I believe it could be a great teaser for parents who are curious about whether homeschooling is for them. My reason is because it requires some planning and organization prior to diving in, and for the parent to set aside time with the child who will be doing the learning.
Included print-outs
I love this part! This file folder contains printed pages you'll need for most of the crafts, activities, and booklets. The organization is inspirational and the clear mark of the teacher who founded this sub.
A close-up of some of the materials & activities
Rather than going week by week through the Parent Guide, I'm going to cluster the types of activities together so you can see the various flavors. We'll start with letters of the week.
Each week has a large printed letter and all the supplies needed to make that letter page into an animal or item that begins with the same letter. A's page comes with green paper squares, googly-eyes, and paper triangles to cut out and create teeth. For B, you receive eyes, feathers, and a beak and feet to cut out to create a bird. Depending on the child's age, they might wish to cut out the large letter and/or the other paper components. My nearly 3-year-old is able to function kid scissors, but only to create "confetti" so I had her focus on glueing.
For C your child will rip up the included brown paper and glue the bits on. Then they'll stick on black dots to create a chocolate chip cookie. My five-year-old worked on this one. I thought it was clever of her to rip the brown paper into strips first, then smaller pieces. For D, I helped my younger daughter cut out the parts of a dinosaur, then she glued them into place with my guidance, and she used watercolors and provided cotton swabs to dot the dino. She liked this activity so much she asked to make a lion one, so I wrote an "L" on a piece of paper and made her some orange paper strips for a mane using our own supplies.
My kids worked together on this rainbow pipe cleaner activity. My five-year-old is capable of cutting out shapes, but was more excited to build the pipe cleaner chains, so I cut out the cloud for them. The instructions suggest using a pencil tip to poke holes in the paper, but we used a hole-punch. My daughter couldn't believe the rainbow colors the box provided did not include all 7 colors—it fizzled at the end of the rainbow with just "blue and violet," but she felt their "violet" was actually "indigo" so we fished out our own purple pipe cleaners and created an extra hole.
My younger child struggled to create a pipe cleaner loop at first, but as you can see from above with the yellow pipe cleaners, we did it together at first, then she found her way. With a little reinforcement from me, she was able to build a chain. I wouldn't have expected that from her age!
Here is a glimpse at supplies for many of the other activities. You'll see a color-matching bunny page; bugs that you use to "fill the jar" by rolling the provided foam die and counting accordingly; number cards you'll cut out and guide your child to stick the correct number of dots to the back; letter cards that each have a picture on the back, which can be used for a letter scavenger hunt or any other game you can come up with.
The workbook activities are shown above, in the in the Parent Guide & Activity Workbook section toward the top. It invites the child to trace and write letters and numbers, find capital and lowercase letters in a letter hunt, color in a certain number of an object, and even do some early identification of words. Every child is different, but my younger one is not at all ready for these written activities, at least not without close and tense guidance. It's not time for her yet. But my five-year-old is able to surmise instructions using context clues and complete entire pages.
Wild Days with Elephant by Little Hippo Books (Author), Gabriele Tafuni (Illustrator) — Retail Value $10.99
Finally, there was a board book included in the box. Each page has a textured section the child can feel, which is always engaging. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the text includes challenging words like "enormous" and "migrate," as well as names of countries where you might find certain wild animals, and interesting facts about them. As far as baby-friendly board books go, it gets two thumbs up for exposing young children to a wide vocabulary and information!
Value - Was This Box Worth It?
The Cost: $42.95 per month + free shipping.
My expectation of The Preschool Box was that it would be another cute kids' subscription with crafts and activities to entertain us — and help me out with sourcing ideas and supplies. It's way more than that. When the first box arrived as a fully stocked, organized, and guided educational experience, I was impressed and delighted. I spend a lot of time at home with my kids, and we enjoy a great deal of unstructured time together, so this box is an incredible resource for us to prioritize age-appropriate education and consistently work to familiarize my youngest with letters, numbers, colors, and more, while exercising her fine motor muscles and fostering focus.
This subscription is worth the cost and then some. The cost of $42.95 per month + free shipping covers the ideas, materials, parent guide, and activity workbook needed for 1 full month of light preschooling from home. There are tons of opportunities to build upon what is provided using your own ideas and supplies, and even if you solely use what comes in the mail each month, there are lots of uses for many of the items.
To Wrap Up:
Can you still get this box if you sign up today? Yes. When you sign up for The Preschool Box, you will be sent this first box, then receive subsequent boxes that work through the following letters of the alphabet, etc, each month.
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