{disclaimer ~ Ivy Kids is a blog sponsor and sent us a kit for this review}

Our love for Ivy Kids Kits continues! These continue to be the best monthly subscription kits I have seen.

Not familiar with Ivy Kids Kits?

Ivy Kits are a monthly educational subscription for children ages 3-8 developed by early childhood teachers with children of their own. You can tell these kits were developed by people who truly know young kids.  The activities are awesome. Not only can you subscribe to a monthly kit, you can also buy past kits.

Each Ivy Kit contains instructions with ways to modify games to best suit each individual child and provide adults with questions to structure a child’s learning. There are enough games and materials in each kit to engage and cognitively stimulate a child throughout the month and can be replayed for years to come.

We were sent  “Over in the Ocean in a Coral Reef ” for this review.  Here’s ALL that was included in this kit:

• The award winning book Over in the Ocean in a Coral Reef by Marianne Berkes
  • Read along Bookmark: Use to assist with reading comprehension.
  • Create Your Own Coral Reef: Use the clay, sea creatures, and sea life provided to create your own coral reef. Let the beautiful artwork from the book inspire your clay creations.
  • Coral Reef Sticker Scene: Use repositionable stickers to create different coral reef scenes
  • 3 Dimensional Fish and Seahorse Ornament: Use puffy paint to create a 3D fish and seahorse decoration.
  • Sea Creature Bingo: Players take turns picking a card from the pile and calling out a sea creature. The player with the sea creature on his or her board collects the card. The first player to cover three sea creature spaces in a row gets bingo. 
  • Painting with Stencils: Use the stencil with watercolor paints to create a beautiful underwater scene with coral, seashells, and sea creatures.
  • Sea Life Exploration: Use your senses to explore the starfish, coral, and seashells included in this kit.
  • Starfish Observation: Use your eyes and hands to explore the top and bottom of the knobby starfish. Record your observations on the sheet provided. Read the starfish fact board to learn more.
  • Starfish Painting: After exploring the starfish, use watercolors to paint the starfish.
  • Coral Observation: Use your eyes and hands to explore the coral. Record your observations on the sheet provided. Read the coral fact board to learn more. (Size, type, and shape of coral may vary.)
  • Coral Painting: After exploring the coral, use watercolors to paint the coral.
  • Clay Imprints: Use the starfish, sea creatures, and seashells to make beautiful, detailed imprints in the clay. You can choose to create a keepsake with the clay by painting the imprint and letting the clay air dry.
  • All Around the Octopus Game: Select a sea creature pawn and travel around the octopus, collecting seashells along the way. The first player to reach the finish first wins!
  • Sea Creature Dominoes: Players take turns matching the sea creature dominoes end to end. Be the first to match all your dominoes and win the game.
  • Songs – Three Little Clownfish and Five Little Seashells: Use finger puppets and seashells to sings some fun songs about clownfish and seashells. These songs are a perfect accompaniment to the book.
  • Sea Creature Memory Game: Players take turns flipping over one number card and one sea creature card to find a match. The player with the most matches wins the game.

  Here’s a picture of it all out of the box!

I organize the printables in a binder and keep the other stuff in the box as we work through the unit.

Activities From Our Box…

My mom {Nanee} comes over once a week to hang out with us and Ivy Kids boxes have become a bit of a weekly tradition.  Nanee happened to come over the day after this one arrived and they dug through it together and chose some crafts to do right away, after reading the book!

Puffy paint sea creatures kicked off their fun together!

She LOVED making coral out of the clay, painting real coral, and creating a coral reef – all with Nanee! During one of their activity days, my mom asked me if I had told my blog readers how much she loved these boxes!  She highly recommends them for grandparents who love to do things like this with their grandkids!

I tend to do more of the school-y stuff with her.  We played BINGO together! You can see her using the ducking from the Make Way for Ducklings kit! We pretended the stuffed owl and the duck were playing too.

She loved the coral reef creature memory game! Since she is beyond learning numbers and number words, she focused on learning the names of the different sea creatures while we played.  I love how the activities can be adapted across many age/ability levels.

The octopus game was a big hit also, she loved the real shells that were included!

Stenciling sea creatures was another favorite activity!

We continue to just LOVE Ivy Kids and are thankful to have these boxes!

We also loved our A House for Hermit Crab kit, Penguin & Pinecone kit and Gotta Go! Gotta Go! kit

20% off your first kit for NEW Subscribers to the monthly subscription kits!

Use code: IVY20

A huge thanks to Ivy Kids for sending us these kits to review. If you are looking for a simple way to do unit studies with your young child, I highly recommend Ivy Kids Kits!

When you subscribe to Ivy Kids, each month you will receive a very well organized kit containing a book and ten or more activities based upon the story. Everything you need to learn and play is included in your kit. I mean EVERYthing. These kits are incredible!