If you’re like me, your kids have plenty of toys that they LOVELOVELOVE for like, 2 months, and then they get tired of. My youngest, age 7, had a WONDERFUL all-consuming obsession with the Cars Movie cars for about 4 months and I delighted in every second. Now, it’s over, and he has like 50 die-cast cars that he loves to look at but not touch. Womp womp. (In his defense, his birthday is a week before Christmas so he basically gets ALL his new stuff within that week…I need to figure out how to spread that out better!) But anyway…keeping my kids challenged, entertained, and yes, EDUCATED through play can be difficult, and I know I’m not alone in this!
So, I was excited when some of my co-workers asked me to try the Kids Night In Box, a subscription service that provides a fun learning, play, and even snacking experience for parents and kids to do together at home. I honestly had ZERO experience with this kind of thing and no idea what to expect, so I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered just HOW MUCH came in one little Kids Night In Box!
We received both the “A Day at the Farm” and the “Swimming Through the Sea” Kids Night In Box. Both boxes looked awesome, but I chose the “Swimming With the Sea” box to do with my 11-year-old and 7-year-old first, because the theme/lesson is one of my FAVORITE ever – learning about “differently abled” people. Both my middle & little kiddos had developmental delays and had to have speech and occupational therapy so they know what it’s like to not be totally “typical.” We also have a very good friend of the family who lights up our lives who has Down syndrome. So I loved that the Kids Night In Box gave me the chance to underscore this important message.
We started out by going through the guidebook that comes with the box (you can see it below!) which outlines the activities and the order to do them in to make the most of your night in.
(Seriously, look at ALL the stuff that comes with these boxes! Here’s the Swimming Through the Sea box!)
First, we got started reading “You Be You,” the book that comes with this particular box. I love that these come with a book that lasts forever, even after the snacks and crafts are gone! My 7-year-old LOVES reading and this is a really fun way to add to his library and recall our fun night in every time we read the book! Sophie, my 11-year-old wanted to read the book.
As the title suggests, it talks about how we’re all different, and yet very much the same. Jonah loved it. Then, we moved on to making and decorating our OWN fish with the modeling clay.
Then, the kids did an exercise with a blindfold where they felt the fish, discovering that even though the fish LOOK different, they FEEL the same! The guidebook then led us to learn about some people who are differently abled and accomplished great things, like Louis Braille, who despite the loss of his sight, invented a system to allow himself and other blind people to read. Sophie even figured out a coded Braille message for us from the provided Braille card.
Next we learned about one of my HEROES who has a disability, Joni Eareckson Tada. Her ministry for disabled people and their families, Joni and Friends, is super important to my family, as my brother, sister-in-law, and my niece and nephews have served with this ministry for years, so we’ve financially supported it. It was great to see Tada, who is paralyzed from the shoulders down, featured in this Kids Night In box. Tada is an accomplished artist who paints with her mouth, so the kids got to try drawing a fish with a marker in their mouth to see how difficult it is – and how talented Tada is!
Both the kids LOVED doing the drawing with their mouths — even though it was hard!
Next we moved on to the great outdoors, where the kids went through an obstacle course I’d set up for them, as directed by the Kids Night In box. First, they had to go through it able-bodied, but the 2nd time they had to do the obstacle course with their hands bound (we were supposed to do legs bound together but the cloth provided wasn’t big enough) so they could experience how it might feel if they were differently-abled.
