Disclosure: I received no compensation for this post. However, I love Kiwi Crate, Tinker Crate, and Doodle Crate so much (as do the kiddos), I like to blog about them from time to time. Links contained within this post may be my referral links, for which I may get credit. However, all opinions are, as always, 100% my own.
April brought another crop of Kiwi Crates to the youngest two Odettes of the household: Tinker Crate (for ages 9-14+) for Jack, the mechanically-inclined child, and Doodle Crate (for ages 9-16+) for Sophia, the artistically-inclined child.
Jack's box was about ROBOTS for April. What I love about these Crates, apart from the fact that they get the child to think outside the, um, crate, is that they offer supplemental material and activities to further the lesson. My kids don't always want to continue, but with these Crates tailored to their particular interests, this lesson expansion is much more likely to happen.
ROBOTS was a really cool crate. When Jack saw markers, his first sinking feeling was that it was an art-related box. If you read this post, you'll remember that Jack "hates Art." But soon, we learned that he would be building a robot that colored on the paper after he built it, and that was Awesomeness. He let his robot go on drawing for quite a while and just admired it from nearby. And that, my friends, was a check in the "WIN" category for my boy.
Sophie's Doodle Crate was all about PAPERMAKING for the month of April. This was quite challenging, Sophia found. She could not get the paper pulp to come out of its container at first, and she actually got upset and walked away from it the first night. True to form, though, she came back and worked at it the next day - this, all on her own, just like I knew she would - and then, she was successful.
"Look, Mom! I made paper!" It looked just as I expected it to look, having seen homemade paper plenty of times. Sophia found it to be, shall we say, rustic, but I explained that that was part of the charm of making paper at home.
The next part of her April Doodle Crate was about BOOKBINDING. She used the paper she made, cut up into teensy pieces, to bind together pages for a book for her Littlest Pet Shop characters. Her latest obsession craze is creating little vignettes for her LPS critters and having me photograph them, which I then print out, miniaturized, onto photo paper for her to frame in her handmade frames. This is one of them.
So it didn't surprise me when she decided to make a tiny bound book for the LPS guys. For the cover, she had me scan the cover of our well-loved copy of e. l. konigsburg's From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler "so that it will match the style of the paper," she said. I miniaturized the scan and printed that out, and that became the cover of her newly bound book for the LPS. I love this. LOVE it.
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So there you have it. This month's Kiwi Crates, a "Robots" Tinker Crate for Jack and a "Papermaking" Doodle Crate for Sophia, were complicated and challenging on both counts but definitely scored an A+, each, from both. Way to go, Kiwi Crate!
Fin.
P.S. We started out with Kiwi Crates when my three were younger, and they all absolutely adored them. These are tailored to ages 4-8 and have plenty of adventures to keep the kids involved and intrigued for month after month of fun!
And now, for even younger kids (toddlers or so), they have introduced Koala Crates. These look so cute, and you can get them even more inexpensively with a monthly subscription like we have for Tinker and Doodle crates. I have no personal experience with the Koala Crates, but based on our love of all the other Crate series, I think these must be pretty fabulous, too!
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