You can watch some of our favorite kid testers practice their nurturing in this month’s unveiling video. Harry, Sophie, and Drew visited Emma Prusch Farm Park to learn all about birds first-hand. Seeing a mother hen on her nest and feeding birds right from their hands really seemed to bring this month’s theme home to them. Before long, they had turned into a whole family of caring birds!

As the video shows, this month’s bird costume was a big hit! We wanted kids to be able to really unleash their imaginations on their masks and wings. Even in testing, no two kids’ masks were exactly alike. I loved seeing how unique each one turned out to be.

For our second project, we knew we wanted kids to be able to create a nest and eggs. But developing the project was a little tricky. What kind of yarn should we use, and what kind of glue? Should kids drape the yarn, or wrap it around the bowl? That’s why kid testing is essential to Kiwi Crate: we don’t consider a project ready until we know just what methods and materials work best.

Meanwhile, for our testers, the messy business of getting it just right was part of the fun…along with the egg racing game they invented. It was so fun, we included instructions in this month’s box!

Speaking of “getting it just right”, I’m not just making a pun when I say we had to break a lot of eggs to create this month’s experiment video: it took nearly two dozen.

As you can see, Nathan had tons of fun getting this one right—including testing how high he could drop the bouncy egg without breaking it. This is an easy experiment to try at home. All you need are vinegar, an egg…and a little patience.

This month’s box also includes plenty of bird facts that children can use in their play. (My kids were especially enchanted by the bowerbird, who collects blue objects from nature to feather his mate’s nest.) I hope you and your child enjoy learning all about birds and bird families this month! We’d love to see your child’s mask and wings—please feel free to share on Facebook! And, as always, to find out even more about this month’s theme, visit our Explore More page.

This nest is so simple to make, but comes out just darling! My daughter has made several now, to fill with her spring knick-knacks.

What You’ll Need

• paper bag (lunch-sized)
• shredded paper

We grabbed our paper bags and some fun colored paper shredding and got to work.

My daughter began to roll the bag outward and continued to roll down until she reached the bottom.

It is that easy! We had a nest ready to be filled with spring fun!

Emma added the colorful shredded “grass” and a few of her tissue paper eggs. I love how sweet they turned out and how easy they were to make.

Can you make a raw egg bounce? Turn a raw egg into a bouncy, rubber egg with just one household ingredient!

We’re all bird lovers in our house, and this darling craft is a great way to make a new fine-feathered friend. Plus, this crow puppet makes one cool silhouette–perfect for some fun shadow play!

Among our list of supplies, we included a measuring tape. (Around here, we do our best learning while we’re doing our best playing, so we say yes to honing math skills!)

Maddie measured out a rectangular piece of cardboard 8″ long. (8″ cardboard is a good length for 2″ balls; 6″ cardboard will work for 1″ balls.)

She cut out her cardboard rectangle, then wrapped yarn around the cardboard lengthwise about 40 times for our large birds (35 times will do for small birds). After going around and around the cardboard, she snipped the end of the yarn.

She then also cut a much shorter length of yarn (16″ total if you’re using 2″ balls; 12″ of yarn if you’re using 1″ balls).

We used this string to tie the looped yarn together tightly, then took the looped yarn off of the cardboard. Holding the yarn where it was knotted, Maddie cut the opposite (looped) end to make a tassel.

She then tucked a Styrofoam ball into the yarn (where the knot is) and made sure the yarn covered the entire ball. She tied off the other end of the ball with the long piece of string to form the crow’s head. Then she made the body by tucking the second ball next to the first, and tied off the other end of the second ball as well. The leftover length forms part of the tail.

Forming the body was a bit tricky! It took a bit of fuss and concentration for little fingers to get the yarn just right around the balls so that the innards weren’t showing… finally, it was accomplished! When all was situated, we poked in feathers (easy and fun stuff from here on out).

Then she cut a diamond shape out of scrap felt. To attach the beak, we put the scissors in the middle of the diamond, and pushed the beak into the Styrofoam head. There! Now our crow can caw!

We added eyes, and poked in a stick somewhere in the underside of the body. Ta-da! A cool new puppet to add to our collection!

Maddie has named him Burdo, and he is quite content to either perch nearby wherever she happens to be working, or hang out on her shoulder while they imagine themselves to be scurvy pirates!

These crates are available with or without a Kiwi Crate subscription! They make the perfect introduction to Kiwi Crate—and, at only $19.95, they make great gifts, too. In addition to the single crates already available on our site, you can now choose from more of our classics: Wind Power, Farmers’ Market, Growing Gardens, and Busy with Bugs.

Growing Gardens

One of our first-ever crates, Growing Gardens allows kids to experience the magic of growing real plants from seed to fruit…by planting their own window garden! Materials in the crate help kids observe their plants as they grow from window planter to backyard plot. When the plants are ripe, kids can try new recipes to showcase their harvest. In the meantime, they’ll decorate a unique clay pot to “plant” paper flowers in. Growing Gardens is one of our top fan favorites, so we’re thrilled to share it in our store for the first time!

Wind Power

Kids loved discovering the power of wind—by building and racing the wind-powered cars in this crate! With Wind Power, you can also design a wind sock to measure the wind, and conduct wind experiments with bonus online material.

Busy with Bugs

This crate got rave reviews for its unique, active first project, where kids create a firefly that glows in the dark and “flies” on its own zipline! Kids also make bug sponge art, then discover even more about bugs with 9 bug exploration cards, featuring bug facts, activities and more.

Farmers’ Market

Kids learn all about healthy fruits and vegetables…by lacing together their own soft, stuffed produce! Then they decorate their own market apron with fabric crayons. Kiwi Crate kids used what they learned (and the included play money) for hours of farmers’ market-themed imaginative play.

We’re so excited to be able to share these special crates with our community. Grab one for a friend—or keep a few on hand for the long summer months ahead!

Peek inside our new box!

All about our new box

• Our new box is much more eco-friendly. Producing, packing, and shipping this box uses much less paper and packaging.
• The manufacturer of our new box only uses cardboard produced from sustainable forests, as defined by Sustainable Forestry Initiative. (Sustainable Forestry Initiative is a nonprofit, international organization that promotes responsible forest management. We’re happy to provide our manufacturer’s approval ID number on request.)
• We’ve changed our box’s inside, too. We’ve removed the lid sticker and closing sticker, as well as the adhesive associated with both. This helps our box to use less material.

To encourage our subscribers to get more use out of the box before recycling it, our packaging is working much harder!

Instead of a lid sticker and tissue paper, you’ll now be receiving a fun box insert, illustrated with this month’s theme. The reverse side of the box insert is now printed with a Kiwi playmate and friend kids can cut out and play with. On the insert’s sides, you’ll see more fun facts about this month’s theme…along with as a silly knock-knock joke to share.

The inside of the box is printed with an outdoor scene. Cutting off the top flap turns the box into a cozy play area for the paper Kiwi and friend, to encourage imaginative play before the box is recycled.

We really appreciate all the great feedback that led us to make this exciting change, and we look forward to seeing all the new uses our subscribers find for their new boxes!

This month’s box hopes to inspire more of that enchantment, with crafts that make something new and exciting out of something that might otherwise be thrown away. To get ready, we hauled hundreds of boxes from our warehouse to our local elementary school’s basketball court and let our Kiwi Crate kids loose!

Here’s what they dreamed up (with lots of grownup help!):

Old cardboard boxes became safes with complicated codes, buses, trains and skyscrapers. My family built an entire house, complete with a peaked roof and mail delivery! Kids and grownups alike had a magical day together in Kiwi City.

This month’s first project—making recycled paper—is all about the magic of making something out of almost nothing. We were so excited about it that we really put our kid testers (and product team) through the paces to get it right. After all, Earth Day is the perfect time to talk about how paper is made!

Traditional paper-recycling crafts usually call for a blender or food processor, but we wanted to design a craft kids could do safely, without heavy machinery. Little did we know how many kinds of paper we’d have to test before finding the right colors, textures, and blends! And we worked just as hard to find the perfect paper-making tray.

In the end, we did it! Our testers loved getting their hands wet—and I loved seeing how excited they were once they realized they’d made something useful and special. Right away, Nathan turned his paper into a special card for his mom. Look how proud he was!

I’m very proud of our papermaking project, too!

While the papermaking craft is about recycling, the second project is about making something beautiful out of elements you can find in nature—fallen leaves. The technique teaches kids to make a stamp out of leaves and decorate a reusable bag. Lucas figured out he could use more than one leaf to make a special pattern on his bag.

Since then, he’s tried stamping with larger leaves, flowers, and even pebbles! I hope this craft encourages your child to notice other items in nature that can be turned into art materials, too.

Part of the fun of this box’s second project is hidden in the reusable bag itself. It’s made from 100% recycled paper, while the handles are made from 100% recycled polypropylene. The bag’s very sturdy—and it’s the exact right size to tote around your Kiwi Crate box!

Speaking of the box itself, we have a very special surprise for our subscribers this month. In honor of Earth Day…we’ve redesigned your Kiwi Crate package!

We’ve switched to a manufacturer that only uses corrugate cardboard produced from sustainable forests. We’ve also reduced the amount of material in the box–for example, you’ll see there’s no tissue paper this month–and made the existing material more useful. (You can find out even more about our redesign here.)

Just cut off the top flap to turn the box into a fun printed environment for imaginative play. As a bonus, we’ll be including Kiwi play cutouts in every box. Download our paper Kiwi (and his friend, Worm) here!

I hope this helps your child get even more play out of the box!

Boxes aren’t the only household items kids love to reuse in imaginative ways. (For example, a paper towel roll is a natural telescope.) So we challenged ourselves to think up creative new uses for everyday items that would be thrown away, like odd socks, cereal boxes, and empty CD cases. This month, kids will turn odd socks into no-sew stuffed toys, make cereal boxes into mailboxes, and use old CD cases to display our very own printable desk calendar!

Kids’ limitless imaginations really inspired us this month! We’d love to hear how your child is inspired to reuse household items like cardboard boxes and juice packs…not to mention this month’s new Kiwi Crate box. As always, to find out even more about this month’s theme, don’t forget to visit our Explore More page. Happy Earth Day!

What You’ll Need

• cardboard tubes (toilet paper or paper towel tubes)
• scrap paper / recycled paper
• pipe cleaners
• googly eyes
• felt
• tacky glue

Gather empty toilet paper rolls around the house. We have a box where we store our trash-to-treasure supplies, which comes in handy for projects like this.

Fold the top of the toilet paper rolls down toward the middle to form the owls ears.

Cut up various scraps of textured and colored paper, pipe cleaners, and felt scraps to use for the craft. Cut the orange felt into little triangles to use for the beak.

Apply glue to the various textured papers and pipe cleaners. We like to use Q-tips to dip our glue in because it keeps my three-year-old from drenching crafts in glue.

Attach wings, textures, beak, googly eyes, and any other decorations you want to use. I think beads and buttons would be fun too.

Now your little owls are ready to display this fall! My daughter likes to show them off to friends when they come over.