Kiwi Crate Subscription Box Review & Coupon – January 2016

Kiwi Crate is a subscription box for children ages 3-8. It arrives every month with all the materials and instructions needed to complete 2-3 crafts centered around a theme, plus additional materials to help educate young learners! This is still my seven-year-old son’s favorite box!

Kiwi Crate kindly sent us this box to review. (Check out the review process post to learn more about how we review boxes).

The Subscription Box: Kiwi Crate

The Cost: Regular monthly subscription is $19.95 per month + free shipping

COUPON: Save 50% off your first month with coupon code MSA50

The Products: Crafts and DIY projects for kids, with supplemental learning kits, booklets, and activities. Crates are filled with materials and inspiration to encourage creativity and curiosity. Projects cover a number of developmental areas through art, science, and imaginative play.

Ships to: US for free, Canada for $6.95 per month

Check out all of our Kiwi Crate reviews and the Kids Subscription Box Directory!

This month’s theme is “Ice Lab”! I know this should be perfect for this time of year, but we’ve been having unseasonable warmth almost all winter. We’re still hoping for one good snow before spring rolls around!

Every month, Kiwi Crate includes a copy of explore! magazine. My son loves this magazine! He always wants to try all of the activities in it, and it also has some cute comics and short articles that are perfect for his reading level.

This month’s projects are “Crystal Snowflakes” and “Icy Experiment! These are the instructions. I’m still getting used to Kiwi Crate’s new printed format, but I have found their instructions to consistently be clear and comprehensive.

These are the supplies that were provided. Everything was included that we needed for both projects except water and some scissors.

These are our completed snowflakes! It’s kind of hard to tell from the picture, but the surfaces are highly crystallized! My son made a mixture of salt, epsom salt, and water, and then painted the mixture onto the snowflake pictures. When the mixture dried, the crystals formed! I told my son that the crystallization would be more visible if he added food coloring (included) to the paint mixture, and he chose to add a few drops of red(!), but it didn’t help visibility much. They look very cool close up and in the right kind of light.

This is the result of our icy experiment. On the left is iced salt water, and on the right is regular iced water. When my son added food coloring, it floated in the salt mixture! The temperature and salt made the water on the left more dense than the food coloring. What a good and easy way to teach him about density!

Verdict: To be completely honest, this was one of our less interesting / exciting months of Kiwi Crate. I think some children might have found this more interesting; sometimes success is at least partially determined by what your child is into at any given moment. It was still fun, though. Plus we learned some things and had a good time together. The snowflakes actually gave us some ideas for amazing ornaments we might make next holiday season! We love Kiwi Crate, and having a little bit of an “off” month doesn’t change that for us. If you have a child in this age range, I can’t think of a better way to spend $20 a month!

What do you think of Kiwi Crate?