Amazon STEM Toy Club Review, Ages 3 to 4 – September 2017

Amazon has launched a 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.

We signed up for Amazon’s STEM Toy Club subscription as soon as it launched, and this is our eighth delivery. This subscription looks like any other shipment from Amazon, with no exterior branding on the box– although this time around, we did get some back-to-school themed tape.

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, more educational and STEM subscriptions for kids, and all Amazon subscription boxes in our subscription box directory!

Keep track of your subscriptions: Add this box to your subscription list or wish list!

Magformers Basic 30 Piece Set – Value $32.83 (MSRP: $49.99)

This month’s toy is a magnetic building set! I’ve never seen this exact one, but I have always thought that magnetic sets are loads of fun. They’re different enough from regular building bricks that they get kids thinking about new ways of making things.

Bonus: When my kid gets tired of this, it will also be a great toy to keep on my desk at work 😉

This 30 piece set comes with 12 triangles and 18 square pieces. The box is not designed for storage and re-use, but that is less of an issue with magnetic toys since they can literally stack and stick together for easy cleanup.

The magnets float inside the plastic frames and freely rotate, so it’s easy to stick them together. We had very few issues with opposing magnetic forces pushing the pieces away while we were playing.

And they’re a snap to play with both flat, and in three dimensions:

The kit does come with a booklet as well. This includes a rundown of the various other kits you can purchase to expand your Magformers collection, as well as some basic visual instructions for making different shapes!

We did encounter a few in the booklet that used additional pieces we didn’t have on hand, but the majority we could complete with the 30 pieces we have.

There are also instructions for carnival accessories which again are not included in this box, but you can make some pretty cool things with that add-on!

My son’s verdict? Loved it.

Initially, I just let him explore, and he enjoyed just collecting all the shapes and stacking them in little towers and then taking them apart again. He’s 2.5 so building and destroying is basically his MO in life at the moment.

Then I let him pick the shape to make from the booklet, so of course, he picked the ball. 😉 I asked him to hand me the different shapes as we went, and we talked about colors and got to do a bit of counting too.

The coolest part is that you build the models flat, and then you sort of pick them up from the center and the sides start to snap together, and it starts to form into the shape as you pull and gently nudge pieces around. It’s really fun and he loved that part!

Almost as much as he loved smashing the finished product and asking me to build it again. 😉

He continued to play with this all evening on his own, too. He sorted out all the colors and shapes, and then made this long line of squares in the kitchen while I was cooking dinner, which he jumped over a lot and drove his cars around. He was pretty excited to see it on the coffee table this morning too, so I think he will get a lot of enjoyment from this simple toy! I love that there are so many ways to play with it.

When I first saw the package, I was worried about losing pieces and annoying clean up, but this is literally a snap. We just stuck the pieces together magnetically and they form a nice, neat stack. I’d even consider putting this in our diaper bag to help keep his hands busy while we’re out at dinner.

Verdict: I am a big fan of Amazon’s STEM Toy Club this month! This toy is deceptively simple looking, but there are so many different ways to play and learn from it. Aside from playing with the magnets from this science kit we received a few months ago, this is our first magnetic toy and my son is really enjoying it! I’m happy that this subscription hasn’t been too repetitive; overall we’ve had great variation in the toys we’ve received.

To Wrap Up:

What do you think of this month’s toy from the Amazon STEM Club Toy subscription box?