Amazon STEM Toy Club Review, Ages 3 to 4 – May 2018

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. This subscription looks like any other shipment from Amazon, with no exterior branding on the box or special insert:

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.

About This Educational Subscription for Kids

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)

May's Toy: Space Explorers Gear Building Set

Learning Resources Space Explorers Building Set – Retail Price $39.99 (Available here for $35.54)

I was not thrilled with our Learning Resources toy last month, but this gear building set is a new take on a toy we previously received and enjoyed (about a year ago already!). I knew right away this one would be a hit with my three year old!

This toy comes with 77 pieces including base squares, gears, a crank, and various tower, planet, and astronaut figures.

While the box isn't plastic or anything, so far it's actually held up at home for about a week and a half– so it's possible to use it for storage, as long as your kid doesn't stand or jump on it. (That's usually how ours end up getting destroyed).

I am already loving this set more than the previous Gears Gears Gears! set we received; it just looks so much more interesting!

The instruction guide is pretty simple. It explains how many of each piece you should have and some general instructions.

Then it also takes you through step-by-step how to build the assembly shown on the box:

There are stickers included so there's a tiny bit of prep/assembly required. The instructions don't really explain the stickers at all, but it's obvious where most of them go. The smaller round stickers just go on top of various gears (covering up the center hole), which took me awhile to figure out. I feel like those won't last too long.

Here's everything laid out (before putting stickers on).

The astronauts, spaceship, flag, and squiggly lines were our favorite part. 🙂

Although I expected this to be a hit, the toy was actually way better and more engaging for my son than I thought! All he wanted to do was play with this for about three days in a row.

It's amazing how much better he is with this toy now, too, a year out from our first Learning Resources Gears toy. He could build the tower himself and just needed a little help tightening things up and making sure his pegs were facing the right direction. Everything else he could do on his own: moving the planets around, attaching the astronauts, interlocking the gears, etc.

While this toy definitely teaches some engineering and cause-and-effect lessons, it was also a fun opportunity to talk about space. He knows some of the planets (mainly Earth, Saturn, and Mars) which happen to be featured in this box. We made up some little stories about the astronauts and talked about what it would be like to go into space, and then he wanted to read his "ABC Space" book before bed. I want more toys like this!

Verdict:

All in all, I was much more satisfied with the Amazon STEM Box this month, and this toy seems like it will get a lot of use (especially once we combine it with our other gear set!) I'm a fan of the concepts that this toy helps to teach and it doesn't hurt that the retail value is good, too.

One thing to remind folks who are interested in this subscription: since the toys are from a variety of different brands, you can expect that some months are hit or miss. This month is great, but other months haven't been as big of a win in terms of being great toys or a great value. Generally, we seem to come out ahead though!

To Wrap Up:

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