The Koala Crate Number Play box offers a collection of activities designed for counting and early math, but whether it’s worth the recurring cost depends heavily on your child’s specific developmental stage. In our experience, while the variety of tools is appealing, the activities sometimes feel slightly mismatched to a child’s actual developmental window, making it a mixed bag of high concept and real-world friction.

What’s Inside the Number Play Crate?

This crate focuses on exploring numbers and counting using play cookies, air-dry clay, and a dedicated guide. The box generally includes:

• Learning Materials: A magazine covering early addition and subtraction concepts.
• Craft Supplies: Air-dry clay and various cutters to create custom numbers.
• Counting Tools: Play cookies featuring numbers (like ten and eight) and a storage holder.
• Guidance: A “play guide” to teach the intended use of all the items.
• Bonus: The box included a book, which we noted is a great addition.

How Well Do the Individual Components Hold Up?

We tested several items from the crate to see what actually worked in practice.

The Board Book Experience

The included book, Kellen Counts to 10, is a cute board book that covers counting various items with its friends. A minor observation was regarding the illustration style, specifically the recurring depiction of the koala’s tail. As an alternative, we found a great book for $5.99 that functions similarly.

Cookie Counting Activity

The wooden play cookies are made of wood, which suggests good durability. However, for a child around 26 months old, connecting the number symbol to the quantity is still a work in progress. While the child enjoyed simply putting the cookies back into the tube, we noted that an alternative set found on Amazon, which uses a cookie jar instead of a tube, seemed almost identical.

Air-Dry Clay Number Fun

The clay activity is conceptually fun, allowing children to press cutters into the clay. However, we ran into a few usability issues:

• Mess Mat Issue: The included mess mat tended to get covered in clay, making it difficult to use cleanly.
• Cutting Difficulty: To remove the numbers, the cutter had to be pressed all the way through the surface before attempting to pull it out, otherwise, the material would stick.
• Deformation: It was surprisingly difficult to extract the numbers cleanly from the cutters, often resulting in slightly deformed shapes.

We noted that while the air-dry clay is good, purchasing additional clay easily on Amazon for $13.99 (for a package of 24) is an option. For more structured play, the Play-doh tools were suggested as a potential alternative to the included cutters, though we couldn’t verify their performance with air-dry clay.

What About the Age Appropriateness?

This was our biggest sticking point. The Koala Crate line is advertised for ages two to four, but the boxes received so far only state “two and up.”

• We feel that a three-year-old will interact with these concepts quite differently than a two-year-old. The lack of a more granular age range within the crates is something we wish the company would narrow down.

When comparing the cost: if we added up the alternatives we found on Amazon, the total cost was $47.56, which is significantly more than the price of the crate itself. Value-wise, the crate isn’t bad, but the activity quality sometimes presents real-world friction.

The Final Verdict

The Koala Crate Number Play box offers a good array of ideas for counting and early math play, and the value in terms of sheer quantity of items is present. However, the experience is hampered by minor usability issues with the clay, and more significantly, by the broad age range that makes it difficult to know if the activities are perfectly timed for a child’s developmental pace. For now, we are keeping the subscription to see how future crates play out (compare this with our experience in our KiwiCo Solve With Me 18-24 Months review), but parents should be aware of the potential mismatch between the box’s contents and their child’s current skills.

---

Disclaimer: Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you if you decide to purchase.

Where to buy

T

KiwiCo Shop at Tkqlhce →

Some links on this page are affiliate links — I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.