Take a trip to the tropical rainforest with creative DIY projects from KiwiCo. Here is my review of Rainforest KiwiCo I got for my son last week. I must say that the child was really impressed with everything he found in the box. The butterfly and the tree turned out very colorful and bright, the texture was nice to feel so he enjoyed playing with these DIY toys for quite a while.

So, I would like to start my review with the box itself and DIY supplies in it.

Rainforest KiwiCo box includes a yellow and black butterfly puppet, 2 felt stickers, 4 wiggle eyes, a cardboard tube, two caps, a rainforest sticker sheet, a wood bead pack, a tube insert, a pom-pom pack, a tree topper, 2 soft and scratchy dots, tweezers, a pom-pom box, an instruction sheet and Imagine magazine.

Butterfly Puppet

My son started with the butterfly. To make a butterfly you will need a butterfly puppet, felt stickers and wiggle eyes.

First, we decorated the wings with stickers. Use your creativity to make your own unique wing pattern. Add wiggle eyes and your butterfly is ready to fly.

Soon your butterfly will turn into a caterpillar with these easy steps to follow.

Flip the puppet butterfly inside out and get its wings inside.

Decorate the caterpillar body with felt stickers and make sure you stick wiggle eyes on it.

This turned out to be a really great toy for my son who learned about the metamorphosis: how a caterpillar turns into a butterfly. And the butterfly itself is so bright and beautiful! It can be used as a puppet too so you could move it up and down with the wings flapping.

Musical Rainstick

Another project from the box is a rainstick and, in fact, it is part of the third project – the forest tree. So I recommend making the projects one by one, just as it is written in the instruction sheet.

To make the rainstick you will need a tube with tube insert, stickers, caps and wood beads.

Close one end of the tube with the cap.

Fold out the tabs of the tube insert and place it inside the tube.

Pour all the wood beads into the tube and close the tube with the other cap.

Adorn the rainstick with rainforest stickers. Make sure you leave some stickers for the other project.

Now you can turn the stick upside down and shake it to make the sound of rain.

Balancing Tree Game

To play the game you will need the rainstick you made in the previous project, tree topper, pom-poms, soft and scratchy dots, tweezers and rainforest stickers.

Decorate the branches with the remaining rainforest stickers.

Attach the branches to the tree trunk. Now you can start the game and use the tweezers to put pom-poms onto the tree branches. When the game is over consider putting pom-poms into the paper box so they don’t get lost.

All three projects are really fun and kept my son busy for hours.

As for the educational part of the box there is Imagine magazine with interesting information about layers of the rainforest and bright illustrations.