Science Fun with Letterbox Lab (Hidden Rainbows Box 1)

I wrote in my Home Ed plans that we would be using the Letterbox Lab to cover off some of our science learning.

Letterbox Lab are a subscription box service and they promise to deliver innovative science kits complete with full colour illustrated instructions and everything you need to have lots of science fun. We have had our first box for a week or so now but as life has been rather busy with one thing and another we didn’t get chance to look at it until recently.

What I really like about this is that there is everything I need to do something with the children all in one box. I can literally open it and work through the instructions with the children. There are two boxes aimed at ages 6+ (explore box) and 8+ (investigate box). We have the explore box and whilst Mr D and Miss E are below the recommended age, they were certainly able to do a lot of this themselves and understood and were able to articulate what they were seeing.

The guide is that the explore box will have 2-4 experiments and this should provide around an hour of activity. I think we could have done it all in an hour, but the children got particularly engaged in one of the activities so it lasted a good 90 minutes or so for us.

So, the hidden rainbows box (Box 1) consisted of a range of items and instructions on how to do three experiments. We laid out all our bits and pieces and set about mixing up the salt water.

We set about doing the first one which was to separate the colours used in ink, then to remove the dye from a candy covered chocolate.

The children, particularly Miss E, enjoyed doing this. It was neat to see the colours separating out and they certainly enjoyed making their own designs on the chromotography paper and dripping the salt water onto it to see the patterns as the inks separated.

Next up was time to make the classes up. This was a bit fiddly for them to do so I did this. I got them to pop the glasses on and tell me what they could see when they looked out of the window into the light or back into the room. They thought this was amazing and took great delight in getting their Dad to try the glasses when he came home from work.

Finally, we set to work with the children’s favourite experiment – the spinners. They had great fun with these and lots of wows as they watched the colours blur and the lines appear as they set the spinners off. They then set about making their own designs. They used dots and lines, wrote their initials and produced ones that were a riot of colours. This occupied them for ages and I could hear them predicting and chattering about what would happen when they spun each design. Annoyingly I didn’t take any pictures of them doing this!

I was really impressed with Letterbox Lab. To have everything handy in one place ready to use is really helpful – I also liked that you are provided with some additional content online that you can access. There are videos showing the experiments as well as some additional ideas of things to try.

I look forward to our next box arriving next month – be sure to keep an eye on my Instagram to see how we get on.

I was sent this letterbox lab box in exchange for a fair and honest review. All words and opinions are my own