Letterbox Lab is a monthly subscription that arrives through your letterbox containing everything your child needs to start playing with science. It is a great way to encourage and enrich your child with this easy to use kit, and help your child to explore the world and make science fun.
Letterbox Lab is available to buy now via a no-commitment monthly subscription to either the Explore box (for age 6+) or the Investigate box (for age 8+). The Investigate box contains between 6 and 9 activities that will engage your child for up to 3 hours. Generally you will find all of the activities from an Explore box in the corresponding Investigate box, but with additional activities that take your child’s discoveries further and require a more extensive collection of lab equipment. The boxes fit through most letterboxes and contain everything you need. Every box contains full coloured instructions, and all of the activities are linked together as a story rather than as a theme.
For parents who wish to view Letterbox Lab’s video instructions for their box, their first Investigate Box is currently hosted on their YouTube channel. It will soon host for their member’s section of the website along with some extra information and instructions for additional activities.
We have received their first Investigate Box – Marvellous Mixtures. There are 12 Investigate Boxes to collect. Inside this box, it comes with 5 different science projects: Incredible Inks, Rainbow Glasses & Spinners, Liquid Rainbow, Brilliant Breathless Balloon and Squirmy Worms. Each project is individually wrapped in a well labelled paper bag.
Before I opened the box, I watched all the video clips (around 2 minutes) and roughly knew what I needed to do beforehand. Both my children can get quite impatient, so I prepared by cutting out some of the materials earlier.
To do the first project – Incredible Inks, I asked my son to add water to the bottles of salt and shake them well. Next, they poured out the salty water into the petri dish and dipped in their special chromatography paper that had lines drawn with felt pens. Then watch how the colour runs.
The kit also includes sweets for your child to dip in to observe how the colour runs. To continue the experiment, you can use the extra chromatography paper provided to make your own ink runs by drawing patterns on the paper using the felt tip pens. Or try different types of paper like kitchen roll, toilet paper or newspaper. Even though this project is quite simple, it’s quite good fun for children to explore different materials, and how different inks and dyes can be made by mixing together 3 primary colours.
For the second project – Rainbow Glasses & Spinners, you discover white light. Black isn’t really a colour at all. Black is what’s left when all the colours have been soaked up. When you spin the spinner, each part of the spinner bounces back some coloured light and you mix the reflected light to make white light.
Later, we did the Liquid Rainbow, Brilliant Breathless Balloon and Squirmy Worms projects. These were good fun and especially nice that you have everything you need in the kit for each project. There is not much surplus to have to keep except the reusable measuring cylinder, gloves and scissors etc. The rest can be recycled or thrown away. There is not much mess to clean. We all enjoyed doing these mini projects and learning at the same time. As a parent, I hate having to go to different places to source for the items. With this box, it comes with everything we need. The first box is very well structured with simple instructions that my children were able to understand. To find out more about Letterbox Lab, please visit https://www.letterboxlab.com/
Disclosure: We received the sample for the purposes of writing this review however all thoughts and opinions remain our own.