The Preschool Box Review, Box 2, November 2024

The Preschool Box is a a monthly subscription filled with 16+ activities and educational crafts for young children to explore with their parents. Each box in this yearlong subscription brings four weeks worth of games, lessons, and art projects that immerse preschool-aged kids (3-5) in the alphabet and numbers in ways that work their fine motor skills and get their brains going.

The Cost: $42.95 per month + free shipping with annual subscription.

This box was sent to us at no cost for review. (Check out the editorial guidelines to learn more about how we review boxes.)

About your reviewers

This box is meant for children ages 3-5, as a way of familiarizing them with letters and numbers prior to entering Kindergarten. Of my two children, one is 3 and in her first year of preschool, and the other is 6 and in Kindergarten.

While this box is meant for only one child, we do elements of it all together, and it's fascinating to see how some aspects seem perfect for my 3-year-old, while others are better suited to the older part of the age range. It's also good practice for them to agree on who will do what projects, or work together.

What's Inside The Preschool Box?

The Preschool Box arrives in a blue box with a cute little owl printed on the top. When you open it, you'll find a detailed parent guide and activity workbook. Underneath is a mess of supplies for the enclosed activities, and on the bottom is a file folder with the print-outs needed. Some kids subscriptions are conducive to open with your child sitting alongside you, but for this one I recommend the adult fetches it from the mail and spends a little time with the parent guide before roping your child in. More on that just below.

Parent Guide & Activity Workbook

The Parent Guide begins with a welcome note, then dedicates "work" pages to each week's activities. Box 2 moves along to the next segment of the alphabet, teaching about the sight, sounds, and use of letters E, F, G, and H. There are a handful of activities associated with each letter, and it's up to you whether you do them all in a cluster or spread them out over the month.

Here's a peek at my 3-year-old interacting with the workbook pages. Most of the activities felt too challenging for her, even the one in the middle, in the yellow rectangle, which was perhaps the simplest one on the page. It asked her to color and decorate 6 Easter eggs—you can see she gave them each a little pink scribble. Meanwhile, my 6-year-old could self-guide her way through the pages. It was a great opportunity for leadership for her, telling her sister what to do and helping her with it.

Included print-outs

The enclosed file folder contains printed pages you'll need for most of the crafts, activities, and booklets.

A close-up of some of the materials & activities

Rather than going week by week through the Parent Guide, I'm going to cluster the types of activities together so you can see the various flavors. We'll start with letters of the week.

E and F have us creating an elephant and a frog. They gave us some great fine motor skill practice with all the cutting, folding, pinching, and pasting. While end-goal-oriented crafts can be frustrating for some kids, I do think there's room for creative autonomy with these letters. They can choose to color them in or not, to place the glued parts wherever they like, or like my children did, do add some pom-poms from our personal supply.

My older child is quite capable with scissors, so she and I teamed up for the cutting-out portions. My younger child loves gluing, and she was happy to take that role on. We used glue sticks, which are only so-so for mixed materials like pom-poms and yarn, but we can always reinforce later if we need to. Scroll to the last photo above to see all our finished letters from Box 2.

This box came with multiple opportunities to practice sorting. The first was this paper print-out that has four sections on one side and two on the other. That gave my kids the opportunity to think of sorting in multiple ways. My 3-year-old went for color-sorting first.

The box also provided three cups and mixed buttons for another style of sorting. You could do it by size, number of holes, color themes, or anything you like. This is a great one to revisit over and over, and supplement with any household trinkets we can find (and there are many to choose from in our home!).

Here's practice cutting, counting, and clipping. You make an orchard of apple trees counting 8 apples on one tree, 9 on the next, and so on. While I already mentioned that my older kid is capable with cutting shapes out, here you can see my younger one tried her hand at cutting out some treetops. She was careful not to cut into the black lines, which shows great improvement from a few months ago. I found it interesting to see the one kid oriented her treetops vertically, and the other horizontally!

For the Ten Frame game, I cut out the number cards and stacked them upside-down. Each kid took turns drawing a number card from the pile, then placing the bingo chips in the right amount of squares to match. Counting chips are such a fun math tool for kids. Scroll and you can see the letter flash cards that came for our E-H focus. There are four for each letter, all with a different word on the back.

Angelina Ballerina Let's Read by by Katharine Holabird and Helen Craig

Whereas Box 1 included a touch-and-feel board book that felt more like a baby book, Box 2 includes one for a wider audience within the 3-5 age group. We know and love Angelina Ballerina stories, and this compilation contains 6 versions that are great for early readers. My 6-year-old is working on her sight words this year and catching on nicely. There are still some challenging words for her in this book, but she's enjoying co-reading it with me. Her little sister loves Angelina and is an attentive listener.

Verdict

The Preschool Box is a little kids subscription that comes in order, working its way through the alphabet. Since we'd already learned our way through the first box, we knew what to expect with the second box. I like the exposure to letters and numbers that my 3-year-old is getting through this box—spending time with them is a great pairing with preschool for her. I think she has lots of room to grow into this box, too. For my older child, who just recently aged out of this box, but is often present while we explore it, there are still learnings to be had! As a budding reader she gets practice with the function of the letters; simple math practice is always helpful, too. For the projects that are easy for her, there are opportunities for her to be a great helper to her sister.

Value - Was This Box Worth It?

The Cost: $42.95 per month + free shipping.

Yes, I think this box is worth the cost! The crafts and activities are well-thought-out, done with expertise, and so organized for us. There is plentiful information to teach parents how to teach their kids. There's no subscription quite like it!

To Wrap Up:

Can you still get this box if you sign up today? Not right away, but eventually! When you sign up for The Preschool Box, you will be sent the first box, then receive subsequent boxes that work through the following letters of the alphabet, etc, each month.

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