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I’m sure you’ve heard of Kiwi Crates or have seen pictures of them online. And you might wonder: Are they really worth it? Why not just buy cheap craft supplies and look up ideas on Pinterest myself?
While I’ll be the first to say go for it to look up your own ideas and gather materials, sometimes it’s a relief to have talented, educated people pull together amazing projects and learning opportunities for your kiddo. And for the price of the crates, the quality of materials and projects is pretty incredible. I find myself frequently surprised at the quality projects they create for these crates.
As a family, we’ve tried out nearly every line of crate from KiwiCo over the past six years. Here’s a completely honest review about what we love (and what we don’t love) about the crates.
What We Love
All the Materials – The crates include nearly everything you need to complete a project – usually the only extra tool we need to grab is a pair of scissors, though some of the Doodle Crates even come with those. I love not having to scrounge around and make sure we have everything we need to complete a project.
High Quality – These crates aren’t thrown together with inferior materials. They are well planned and thought out, and each of the projects use high quality items, from the craft materials themselves to the tools and implements included.
Independent Activities– Though it depends on the age of your child and the crate they get, a lot of these can be done as completely independent activities. My 7 year old has been able to do the Kiwi and Tinker crates on his own, and my 9 year old can do the Eureka Crates with little to no help from me. They’ve occasionally needed a little help troubleshooting or tying a particularly difficult knot, but overall they have been able to complete them as independent projects.
Fun Together – While this may seem to contradict my previous point, these crates can be done as a fun activity together. When my boys were younger, we usually did the activities and crafts together. I loved that they provided a fun opportunity for us to do a project together without me having to come up with the activity or stress that we have all the materials.
Extras – Not only does each project often come with extra materials to do more, but each comes with a fun booklet that provides more ideas for activities, stories to read together, or even engineering and history to learn about.
So, what are the downsides?
Price – For some families, it might be out of their budget to purchase a subscription to a craft crate like this. However, purchasing individual crates from the KiwiCo shop make a great one-time gift or activity for your kiddos. And some grandparents or other family members might love the opportunity to gift a subscription or a crate as a gift as well.
If you have kids who love to keep things – If you have kiddos that get very attached to things and want to save every little thing, continually getting crates month after month may cause problems. While all of the projects and extras are amazing, it can get overwhelming if you try to keep everything.
Our solution for this is to have a designated area for each kiddo to keep the projects they’ve completed. If there are extra materials they think they might want to use later (many of the crates come with more materials than you need to complete just one project), they store them in a ziploc bag and label it.
We’ve also worked with them to think through what is worth keeping for a long time and what may be good to save just for a short time to enjoy. These are good life lessons to learn in general, and this gives us the opportunity to help them think through this.
Many of the materials, including the crate boxes themselves, are recyclable as well.
Ready to Try It Out?
If you want to try out any of the crates from KiwiCo, you can choose a box type here or on the banner below. Just be sure to cancel if it’s not a subscription you plan to keep.
Don’t want to start a subscription? You can buy individual crate projects from the store here.
Not sure which crate to get for your kiddo? Here’s my in-depth at most of the crates from KiwiCo, and some suggestions on what may work well depending on the age and interests of your child.
