Reviewed by
Sharon
We received this box when we had family was visiting so I thought it would be a great opportunity to test the products out with someone else to see what they thought. The theme this time was Kings and Queens.
Your Majesty!
It was nice to see such diversity in the themes as the first box we had contained a lot of small parts that I was worried about losing, whereas this time round we did have a few smaller elements (gems for the crown, for example) but otherwise all the activities were quite self-contained which was great and allayed one of my fears from box one! There were two activities in this box (making a crown and some finger puppets), as well as a chart to stick all the toucanBox tokens and the booklet to accompany everything.
It’s lovely that there is a personalised note in each box and we could see straight away that we were going to have lots of fun this week. Given that someone was about to turn four, it seemed fitting that he was going to get to be a king for a day. I let Nannie loose with the boy and some scissors to see how much fun they would have!
King for a Day
Making the crown was even simpler than I thought it would be – and left us with some gems and felt that we could make into other things – we tried to make a bracelet with ours, I’m not sure it worked! However it was good to see that there would be more scope to make use of the materials and it also gave me some ideas for craft projects of our own, especially with Easter around the corner. You could easily adapt this style of crown to make it into Easter Bunny ears, for example. As you can see, someone was very proud of his creation.
Finger puppet fun
The other activity was to turn these pop-out characters into finger puppets. Sadly I think on this occasion the fun of making a crown took over and we didn’t quite get to finish the puppets. I thought they were really good quality, the card was thick enough for them to be stable and not break easily, but it was still flexible and wouldn’t hurt (I remember playing with similar style puppets when I was younger and getting scrapes and cuts from the edges!).
We’ve got a long train journey coming up so I am going to pack these up in my bag along with the colouring pencils. I think I have felt a bit of (self-imposed) pressure to open the box and complete all the activities in one go, but there is no rulebook that says you have to do this and I think the portability of ToucanBox is great! I now have a little activity that I can take with me wherever I go and I know it will keep him entertained, with really very little thought or forward planning from me – a big deal considering I work full time.
Ultimately we really like toucanBox, even though we didn’t get to finish everything this time, we have them ready to go. We’ve also since had the Easter box delivered and again, the fact I can just pack this in a bag and take it with us over Easter means that we’ve got some on-hand fun no matter where we are or what we’re doing (perfect for the weather at the moment!)
By Evelyn 
