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Koala Crate
Cost: Monthly Subscription: $19.95/month. Swirling Ornaments Holiday Crate: $16.95 (one-time purchase)
Ships To: United States and Canada.
Coupon Code: Use code “SHARE10” to save $10 off your first month.
Koala Crate is from Kiwi Crate’s new(ish) line of crates and is designed for preschoolers ages 3-4. The box includes all the materials and inspiration for projects related to a theme such as colors, transportation or safari. Crates are designed to give children exposure to new materials and new concepts that encourage hands-on learning and fun.
They also offer single crates for sale in their shop like this one. The “Swirling Ornaments” Holiday Crate is $16.95 and is available while supplies last in the Kiwi Crate shop.
Koala Crate ships via FedEx Smart Post and, in general, takes a week to get across the country to me.
Single Crates are one time purchase boxes, but they are also different than monthly Koala Crate subscription boxes in that they only have one project in them.
The Koala Crate “Swirling Ornaments” holiday crate included all of the materials needed to make three colorful holiday ornaments. It was high on the messiness scale, high on the grownup involvement scale and involved “creating”, “moving – fine” and “discovering”.
For whatever reason I didn’t take any pictures of the actual project happening? I was perhaps too worried about WB’s use of food coloring and glitter paint to worry about pictures ;). The first step in this project is to add food coloring to your plastic ornament and swirl it around so the entire bulb is coated. He so wanted to dump every single color of into each and every bulb, but we followed the instructions and only used one or two colors at a time. After that you add the glitter paint to the bulb, drop in a marble and swirl everything around. Letting a 3 year-old swirl around an open ornament with liquid and glitter paint is very scary, but we managed ;). After that it’s just a matter of waiting for the paint to dry (usually takes about a day) and then you cork the ornaments and add the toppers. We found the pipe cleaner to be hard to wrap / shape so I wish they would have used a pipe cleaner with a more firm wire inside.
I think they turned out pretty good! We do have some regions of the ornaments with “clumps” of paints, but they aren’t super noticeable. If we end up hanging them from the tree I will really have to wrap the pipe cleaner hangers around the branches so they don’t slip off.
What do you think of the Kiwi Crate Holiday Shop? Have you ordered any of their Holiday Crates? They have tons of available and you can use coupon code “SHOP50” to save 50% off ALL Kiwi Crate Holiday Crates (that includes Koala Crate, Doodle Crate and Tinker Crate).
If you are interested in their monthly subscription you can use the coupon code “SUB600” to save 60% off your first month of any of the Kiwi Crate family of brands, including not only Kiwi Crate, but also Tinker Crate, Doodle Crate and Koala Crate!
Ellie and I did this last night; I had the same thought about the pipe cleaner. Also, she dropped the bottle of color into the balls twice; the second time we couldn’t get it out! I wish they were a little bigger to solve this problem and to make it easier for little hands to manipulate.