Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! Whether you're traveling to visit friends and family, stuck inside on snowy days or just needing to fill some downtime- sounds like it's time for our Winter 2025 Pouch Subscriptions!
(PS, don't have a pouch subscription yet? You can sign up anytime here. Our pouches ship every 12 weeks, depending on when you first placed your order. The activities in our pouches change after those 12 weeks to ensure you always get new activities, no matter when you signed up).
What's coming this Winter?
Pouch 1: Alphabet Matching + Dry-Erase Letter Writing Cards
At first glance, it looks like a simple letter card set, bright colors, friendly illustrations, a little dry-erase marker tucked inside. But oh, there’s so much learning happening here. Kids select the alphabet pieces, match them to the coordinating letter spots, and flip the card to trace the letter using a wipe-clean marker. Without even realizing it, they’re building the earliest blocks of literacy: letter awareness, sound connection, and handwriting confidence.
Emerging Skills Focus: [PS- what do we mean by emerging skills? Check out the education behind our company here!]
- Pre-Academics
- Fine Motor
Why we love it:
This isn’t just letter recognition! It’s letter ownership.
Matching A to Ant, Y to Yak, and every letter in between helps kids understand how letters look, how they sound, and how they feel in hand and on paper.
Have your little learner say the sound out loud as they trace: “M makes ‘mmm’ like monkey.”
Or turn it into a challenge: “Can you match five letters before we erase and start again?”
The tracing side is where the magic happens. Each stroke strengthens hand muscles, builds grip endurance, and prepares them for future writing tasks, journals, name-writing, homework (the big kid kind). This tiny card deck is actually a reading-readiness goldmine.
Pouch 2: Wooden Tangram Shape Builder with Picture Cards
This isn’t just a puzzle, it’s a whole geometry gym in a four-inch frame. Your kiddo will use wooden tangram pieces to recreate animals, letters, shapes, and patterns from the fold-out guide. Each challenge invites them to rotate, flip, and problem solve until every piece finds its perfect home. It’s thinking work disguised as play. Just how we like it!
Emerging Skills Focus:
- Pre-Academic Skills
- Spatial + Visual Planning
- Cognitive Flexibility
Why we love it:
Tangrams make the brain stretch.
Kids learn that shapes can transform. Triangles become animals, squares become rockets, colors shift and reappear. This is early math thinking, but it feels like building a picture.
Try prompting as they work:
“What if you turn that triangle another way?”
“Can two shapes make one big shape?”
Every rotation is problem-solving. Every completed picture builds confidence. These puzzles encourage patience, experimentation, and flexible thinking. The kind that turns into strong problem solvers in math, reading, and the real world.
Pouch 3: Magnetic Ball-and-Rod Builder Set
They connect. They roll. They stick. They fall apart and somehow rebuild themselves again. This magnetic building set invites kids to invent endlessly. Bridges, creatures, towers, spirals, letters, whatever their imagination decides. And while their hands are busy, their brains are busy-busy too.
Every click and pull is developing strength, coordination, curiosity, and early engineering intuition.
Emerging Skills Focus:
- Fine Motor
- STEM Thinking + Creative Problem Solving
- Focus + Bilateral Coordination
Why we love it:
This is the kind of toy that grows with your child. Little hands start by exploring magnetic push-and-pull. Soon they’re building tall structures, comparing lengths, and experimenting with what sticks and what doesn’t. That’s early science in action.
Try extending the learning:
“Can we build a bridge that holds two balls?”
“Let’s sort by color or shape before we build.”
This is quiet concentration disguised as fun. Stronger hands. Stronger focus. Stronger thinkers.
Loose Creative: Mess-Free Animal Sticker Art
At first glance, it looks like a simple peel-and-stick craft - five adorable animals, blank and waiting to be decorated. But with so many colorful dot stickers, this becomes a development playground. Kids place stickers one by one, filling in their flamingo, giraffe, butterfly, parrot, or bear until each one transforms from “before” to “after.” It’s creativity without the cleanup — no paint, no glue, just focus, fine motor work, and pure delight.
Emerging Skills Focus:
- Fine Motor
- Creativity + Pre-Writing Skills
- Color Recognition + Visual Scanning
Why we love it:
This isn’t just a sticker page, it’s a hand-strengthening workout disguised as art.
Peeling stickers builds pincer grasp, precision, and finger strength, the exact muscles used for holding pencils, buttoning jackets, tying shoes, and writing letters later on. Every sticker your child places is one more step toward confident, coordinated hands.
Try narrating the process as they create:
“You found a yellow dot! Where should it go?”
“Let’s fill all the purple dots first — can you find them?”
They’re also strengthening visual discrimination as they scan sheets, search for sizes, and place dots in specific spaces. This becomes early math and patterning without ever calling it math. Just joy. Just art. Just childhood.
Want to extend the play?
Sort stickers by color first - create a rainbow animal!
Count the dots used: “How many pink spots did your butterfly get?”
Tell a story about the animal when it’s complete: “Where is your giraffe going today?”
It’s quiet. It’s focus-building. It’s screen-free success you can pull out anywhere.
Perfect for restaurants, travel, quiet time, or days when energy needs slowing instead of speeding.
