Review: Children’s activities with Weekend Box

With the wet weather recently, it’s been really hard to get outside and do some of our usual activities.  Although I pin lots, we never really get round to indoor activities, and often if I do suggest them, N’s not too keen.  So I was looking forward to being sent a Weekend Box to sample and review.

The idea behind the boxes is that they’re fortnightly boxes, and they incorporate 4 activities based on something to make, cook, explore, and something green.  The boxes are aimed at children age 3-8 and include pretty much everything you’d need to do the activities (the cook activity obviously requires main ingredients to be available, but there’s something special included to make the taste of the recipe).

Our weekend box arrived early last week, and as with any interesting parcels, N was keen to dig straight in.

The box itself is fun and really focused on children – it’s extremely well packaged with lots of sticky tape, so takes a bit of getting into. No danger of anything falling out in the post though.

All the activities are packaged in their own little coloured envelopes, with an instructions sheet or additional guidance on decent quality card.  N wanted to get into the little parcels  straight away, so I really had to hold him off.  We did decide to try one of the activities straight away to avoid a pre-schooler meltdown.

Our first activity was to make some 3D glasses.  N loves using scissors but his safe craft ones weren’t going to cut the mustard on accurately cutting round the lines to cut out the glasses.  Cue my good scissors and a cut finger for me as I was careless in trying to stop him chopping straight across the guidelines a second time.

It was really easy to follow the instructions – with a 3 year old it’s hard to get things exactly right while letting him do as much as possible.  He loves glue, and the little bags of glue provided were just right for keeping fairly tidy, so he was happy sticking away.

Needless to say once we’d make them, N refused to wear them for a photo or to spend enough time looking through.  He’s all about the process rather than the end product and seeing what they actually show!  They worked out pretty well though, and there was an activity sheet with 4 3D photos to look at and answer the questions, so it wasn’t just about making the glasses.

I left the box with the activities on the side in the kitchen, so yesterday after breakfast, he wanted to get them out again.  We started off with the sand art.

This was really simple – a reversible card, 2 pictures to complete, 4 colours of sand, and glue.  Really simple, but effective and really good at helping younger children with fine motor skills and sensory touching of the sandy texture.  It was simple enough that as long as the glue is vaguely within the outline of the picture, it looks really good.

I’d definitely put the different coloured sand on different plates next time, as N just wanted to mix them all up rather than keeping them neatly separate.  Grr, mucky pup!

We don’t have any bird feeders in our garden, but N likes watching them on the bird table at his aunt’s.  So the ‘make a bird feeder’ activity was perfect.

Of course, N was more interested in making his own shapes with the lolly sticks provided, but he was good at putting the glue in the right places, and would line the sticks up in vaguely the right place when building the ‘tower’.

The only downside to the box was with this activity in that we only had one small piece of string that wasn’t long enough to create a hanger.  Luckily I had string so used our own to give a more substantial and even hanger.

Finding somewhere to hang the feeder proved harder than making it as we don’t have anything in our garden.  We had to resort to one of the trees out front, so hopefully it will get some birds going to it eventually.

N wanted to put the full sandwich bag of bird feed on the feeder, but I managed to stop him by saying, we’d refill once the birds had eaten the first lot.  It looks great, and hopefully we’ll be able to do some bird spotting and N will learn some bird names, rather than just calling them all ‘birds’.

Overall, I think the weekend box club is a great idea.   It makes you do structured activities, rather than promising you’ll do some of the idea you take from Pinterest and then not actually doing them.  There’s also the educational aspect to many of the activities which is a bonus.

If you fancy trying out a Weekend Box, the standard price isn’t bad at £7.50.  However during January, if you use discount code EMMA21, you’ll get your first box free.  No excuses for not getting crafty with the children now!

—————————————————————–

Disclosure: We were sent a weekend box for review purposes.  All opinions are our own.