Kiwi Crate (from parent company KiwiCo) is a subscription box for children ages 5-8. 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!
KiwiCo offers boxes for different age groups: Cricket Crate is for 24-36-month-olds, Koala Crate is for 3-4-year-olds, Kiwi Crate is for 5-8-year-olds, and Doodle Crate and Tinker Crate are for 9-16+-year-olds. There really is something for every age with this company.
This review is of the $19.95 a month Kiwi Crate box, for 5-8-year-olds.
This box was sent to us at no cost for review. (Check out the review process post to learn more about how we review boxes).
About Kiwi Crate
The Subscription Box: Kiwi Crate
The Cost: $19.95 per month + free shipping
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: U.S. for free, Canada for $6.95 per month
Kiwi Crate May 2018 Review
The theme for this month was My Body & Me. This was the included booklet that showed us the various activities in our crate and provided instructions. The pictures are very clear- detailed and in color- and I like that they always provide a materials list for everything that should be in your crate.
On the back of the booklet was our sticker for this month’s project and their social media links.
This is the little sticker chart that we received in our first Kiwi Crate along with our welcome note. This time we got to add our My Body & Me sticker after we completed our projects.
Each month you get a Kiwi Explore! magazine that goes along with your crate’s theme. There is a letter from Steve the Kiwi and a little story to go along with the theme. This month’s story was about taking care of a sick patient to fit with our body theme. The rest of the magazine is filled with additional activities and information.
The extra activities this month included making a model lung to explore how lungs work and making cheesy bone breadsticks for a snack. These are great educational activities that are also really fun.
They also included a few bonus activities such as a maze and these left vs. right hand drawing experiments. I always love that they include some activities that an older child can complete independently and that they always tie in with the theme in a really creative way.
The first activity in our box was to make our own stethoscope. If your kids are anything like mine, the stethoscope is a favorite toy, so making our own using these ordinary, simple items was ingenious to me!
The first step was to attach the tubing to the funnel, and then use the included connectors to connect the remaining tubing. They included a plastic headband to tape the tubing to, then we added some little earbuds to the ends and our stethoscope was complete! So easy!
The best part was that this stethoscope actually worked really well. The earbuds being rubber made them relatively comfortable to wear and the headband shape was the perfect size for a kid’s length stethoscope. My daughter had a lot of fun playing with this. While I’m not sure if it’s going to stay in one piece for that long, I think it’d be really easy to replicate on our own if we needed to. They also included extra stickers which I think is the part that would most likely need replacing!
I love that they always go the extra mile and they included some extension activities that you can do with your stethoscope and even included this little dry erase Doctor’s Notes board with a marker. One of those extra special touches that is quickly making this box into one of our favorites!
The next activity in our box was making stuffed organs. They included materials for a heart, brain and a stomach. They were made of a thick felt and had holes around the outside and instead of sewing with a needle, they just used simple colored laces that we weaved in and out. Then we used the included stuffing to fill them and tied them closed. Once again, they made it so easy to do and included everything we needed.
They included little googly eyes (with sticky backs- so no glue necessary!) and encouraged us to use those and the marker to draw faces on our organs. This was a cute touch. They also included Velcro circles (with more sticky backs!) so that we could attach our organs to our large body chart. It was neat to see my daughter matching up her organ shapes with the chart. I never thought organs could be so cute or fun!
The final activity was to create our own X-rays using bone shaped gel clings and glow paper. We just put our bones on our paper and then left it under a lamp for a little while and then we were able to see our X-rays clearly in the dark. Such a cool idea! The best part is that the paper resets so we can do this as many times as we want. This is really fun and I think as a kid I would have thought it was great! We chose simple bones for ours, but an older child could definitely challenge themselves and try to recreate the hand bones!
They also included some extension activities for the X-rays such as making an X-ray of a broken bone. This hits a little too close to home though as my almost 2-year-old just broke his arm yesterday (talk about irony). This actually really helped though because we talked to him about our skeleton (the body chart) and the x-rays we made (very realistic!) while he was getting his real x-rays done to distract him. I’m not sure he fully understood, but it definitely helped me in this situation. So this project is a great tie into real life experiences, but I really hope no one else has to experience it like we have!
Verdict: This was a really fun and educational Kiwi Crate! My kids already love playing with our toy medical kit and enjoy learning about the body, so this was another really engaging topic that I think most other kids will enjoy as well. Once again I was amazed at how well thought out the projects are- they are so simple and they always make it so easy to put everything together. It’s very stress-free for me as a parent of younger kids who need my help, and for an older kid, the learning can be completely independent. At $19.95 plus free shipping, I think it was a great value for a box of educational activities that were creative and exciting.
To Wrap Up:
Can you still get this box if you sign up today? It is possible you might get this crate, but it is not a guarantee. From KiwiCo:
Crates are assigned each month based on availability and your crate history - not all subscribers receive the same theme each month.
Coupon – Save 40% off your first month! No coupon required, just use this link!
Check out all of our Kiwi Crate reviews and the Kids Subscription Box Directory!
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