A year ago, we reviewed our first Kids Weekend Activity Box, fairly soon after their product launch. You can see the fun we had last time, on the following 2 posts.
Cooking Potato Boats and making 3D glasses.
Sand Art and making a bird feeder.
The boys had a great time doing these activities, so they were delighted to hear that we had been invited to review another box.
I captured son2 opening the box on video.
For those of you who haven’t come across it before, I’ll introduce you to Weekend Box which is a box containing Healthy, Green and Creative themed activities for your children delivered through your letterbox every fortnight. It is similar to a Graze healthy snacks box but with children’s activities in.
Each box contains 4 colour-coded activities:
Something to COOK (a healthy recipe with accompanying secret ingredient)
Something to MAKE (a craft kit with all the materials required)
Something GREEN (some seasonal seeds to plant or something to make with recycling/rubbish material)
Something to EXPLORE (sensory exploration games, for example)
Each activity is designed to build sensory exploration skills with little ones aged 3-6 as well as help teach them about different life skills in a fun and engaging way. And the colour coding makes it easy for the children to match the packets to the instruction sheets. You also get stickers for completing the activities. And the inside of the box turns into a certificate which can be coloured in.
The boxes are sent out (with free delivery) in time for the weekend every fortnight and since everything’s included in the box, you can focus on spending time having fun with your little ones.
Our box theme was Chinese New Year and a new feature included in the box is a card of Talking Points. The boys were really interested in all the information. They are already very knowledgable on the Chinese years and quickly told me that this year will be the year of the sheep and which years they are born in. All this has been learnt from a calendar that we were given at a Chinese restaurant which is on son2’s bedroom wall.
The four activities in our box were as follows:-
Red Activity with Wooster the Rabbit – Fortune Cookies.
Blue Activity with Sammy the Squirrel – Paper Plate Drum.
Green Activity with Hattie the Hedgehog – Chinese Lanterns.
Yellow Activity with Oswald the Owl – Chinese Dragon.
The boys were keen to start with the cooking. They wrote their fortunes and here I would suggest that I should have pre-cut the paper into strips for them in advance, as they boys wrote them very large when left to do this part by themselves. So we had to a lot of folding to get them small enough to fit inside. And we had to do a bit more improvisation as I don’t possess a large enough cookie cutter. I do want some larger ones. In fact, I’ve had 11cm and 13cm ones on my wishlist for several years but can’t find them anywhere. So if anyone knows where I can get some, please let me know. Instead we used a knife to cut round a tupperware lid as our template. Son1 was fine with that but son2 needed a bit of help. They both progressed well after that, with just a little bit of help on sealing the cookies shut, as they seemed determined to pop open.
I had already spotted that there was an error in the recipe versus the ingredients list. No mention of what to do with the 2 spoons of honey or syrup. I decided that we would use honey instead of oil to brush half the cookies. And feedback from the boys. The toppers didn’t live up to their expectation from the photo which looks like lots of small pieces of raspberry. Instead we had just 9 larger pieces of strawberry. Little and lots would have been more fun for sprinkling. However one thing there were no issues with was how yummy they tasted. We will certainly make these again.
Secondly the boys made the paper plate drums. I provided additional plates etc, so that they could make one each. They were fine with this activity, but we didn’t find blu tack was that great at sticking the lolly sticks together. Very wobbly drum handles, so son1 requested sellotape instead.
Then we saved the other two activities for the following weekend. This time we started by making Chinese Dragons. I didn’t have a similar piece of yellow card for them both to participate, so I improvised by folding an A4 sheet of yellow paper in half and glueing an old Xmas card inside to stiffen it. I was very impressed with the glue dots that were included in this activity, worked better than the blu tack last weekend. The boys decided they wanted to draw the scales onto their dragons with felt-tip pens rather than using the paint. And then they had great fun pretending to be dragons, the exploratory part of the activity. I didn’t even need to prompt, they just started instinctively whilst posing for photos with their completed dragons.
And finally I had been saving the tubes from the loo rolls this week, ready for their Chinese Lanterns. This time we did use the paint, but I may have mixed it too stiff, as it wasn’t quite enough for 2 tubes. And we did have one objection from the boys. They didn’t like the colour pink for the handles, they said they should be red too, so you’ll see they are actually holding the lanterns by the base rather than the handle. I’m not sure how we could have incorporated putting LED tealights inside, as per an additional suggestion on the sheet, since they had no bases.
The boxes retail at £7.50 including delivery which is great value for money in my opinion, less than £2 per activity. Last year I discussed what families of more than one child should do, and I’m pleased to see that you can now include siblings at £4 each. And you may choose to have your boxes fortnightly or monthly.
I think it is so exciting for a child to get their own box through the post. And son1 is several years above the target age of 3-6, but still really enjoyed it.
If readers of my blog would like to try out the Weekend Box, I have been given a unique promo code for you to get your first box for free (including free delivery).
The unique promo code is CLAIRE43 and can be redeemed at www.weekendboxclub.com. If you have any difficulties with the code, try signing up with this direct link www.weekendboxclub.com/main/signup?promocode=CLAIRE43
Disclosure. This post is a review of a product I was sent for free. All opinions are my own.
Yet another blogging mummy!!! 