Our latest kit from Koala Crate was all about the farm – not just animals, but also the  vegetable growing element of farming, which I loved since it’s not as common to find toys in this category. Overall, the kit was fantastic for play – not as much of a crafting one – which suited Travis just fine. In short, he loved this one!

The first project was to create pipe cleaner-and-bead vegetables, which could then be planted in the provided vegetable patch (a cardboard base with form “dirt” cut outs).

The materials were great for Travis to practice bead threading in any order he liked; when he tired of that, I then assembled the veggies “correctly” so the beads wouldn’t get lost.

From there, he couldn’t get enough of the game! He loved poking his fingers through the dirt, planting the veggies, pulling them up and seeing if he had a “match” or a “mis-match,” and then starting all over again.

As we planted our veggies, he so eagerly asked, “When will they grow up?” I loved how he understood the concept of veggies growing in the earth.

The kit also had stickers to decorate the base of the garden, including cute ants and worms, so we talked about how these itty bitty helpers help a garden grow!

I put together the barn that came in the kit – a cardboard frame with adhesive Velcro dots – only because misaligned Velcro wouldn’t have held the barn together; however, preschoolers should be able to tackle this step on their own no problem!

Finally, it was time to assemble our felt animal finger puppets, and I was impressed with Travis’s craftsmanship on these (already an imdprovement over the stickers he placed willy-nilly on last month’s Safari crate animals!).

Ok, not all of our animals looked exactly “right”, but he really thought about where everything should go before adhering – eyes up top compared to noses etc. When I gave him the pig’s curly tail, he even said told me it should go on his back, using both sides of the puppet.

Later in the week, we continued the gardening fun with a final, at-home project. I cut up a bunch of celery, a bell pepper, an apple, and mushrooms, and laid them under a blanket (brown for “dirt” of course), and let Travis loose in his own “vegetable garden”! He loved unearthing the real veggies.

To get crafty with it, I laid out plates of paint, and Travis dipped the cut sides of the veggies into the colors.

His own creation turned into a very smooshy painting…

…so I also made a print of my own to show him the different patterns that each fruit or veggie could create. The celery almost looks like a rose!

In sum, we adored this crate. Thanks Koala!