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Kiwi Crate
Cost: $19.95/month.
Ships To: United States and Canada.
Coupon Code: Use code “SBR50” to save 50% off your first month.

Kiwi Crate boxes are designed around fun themes and filled with all of the materials and inspiration for hands-on projects for kids ages 3-7. L and I have been doing the projects together for ages, but he’s close to outgrowing it (he’s 7) so my 3 year-old and I worked on this one together.
Kiwi Crate ships via FedEx Smart Post and generally takes about a week to arrive. All of my Kiwi Crate boxes (Kiwi Crate, Koala Crate and Doodle Crate) arrived together in one large box this month, as they have been lately.

The January 2016 Kiwi Crate theme was “Ice Labs” and included two projects “Crystal Snowflakes” and “Icy Experiment”.

Project #1 – Crystal Snowflakes

The first project in the crate was Crystal Snowflakes.  This project was medium on the grownup involvement scale, medium on the messiness scale and involved “discovering”, “creating” and “moving – fine”.

I don’t often find Kiwi Crate to be wrong on the messiness scale (if anything I find them to be overly conservative), but in this case I think they understated the mess.  LOL!  Salt was everywhere!  The “recipe” called for a scoop of Epsom salt, a scoop of water and a pinch of table salt, but that made too small of a batch for us so we doubled it.  It really did make for a cool crystal paint and looked even neater when we added food coloring to it.  You have to snip off the top of the food coloring to open it up and my advice is to use a sharp pair of scissors.  We didn’t and got food coloring everywhere!  Oops.

Project #2 – Icy Experiments

The second project we worked on was Icy Experiments.  It was low on the grownup involvement scale, medium on the messiness scale (again I thought it should have been high) and involved “communicating” and “discovering”.

We started with the experiment included in the information booklet.  Both cups contain water, ice cubes and food coloring.  One also contains table salt.  We discovered that the difference between the two is that the food coloring floats in the cup that contains table salt! You have to follow the instructions in order to get the correct results, but we thought it was super neat.  We also attempted a few of the other projects in the “Icy Experiments Lab Book” and had some fun with those as well.  We are going to save the booklet so we can do more of the projects with L.

explore! Magazine

As usual, the explore! magazine includes puzzles, games, recipes, experiments, stories and additional activities relating to the theme.  I always try to keep one in my bag so the kids can use it while waiting for their food at a restaurant or in waiting rooms.

Did you get the January Kiwi Crate?  What’d you think? If you are interested in subscribing or just want to learn more, click here. New subscribers can use the coupon code “SBR50” to save 50% off their 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!