Review: The Babbler Play Kit By Lovevery.

Last winter, The Babbler Play Kit by Lovevery arrived for Eva. Lovevery offers subscription kits to help parents answer questions like: “what should my child be learning?” or “what skills should I teach her”?

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Lovevery makes planning a bit simpler and more fun plus offers fresh materials for your child. If you’re a toy rotator, these subscription kits will align with your style because a new kit will be shipped to you every three months like clockwork. Lovevery kits are curated to meet a child based on their age and the items are solid and sturdy and honestly, they’re pretty to look at! They are also heavily Montessori-aligned.

If your child is younger, here is my review of The Thinker Play Kit. That kit is for children 11-12 months old.

The Babbler kit is made for children 13-15 months old. Eva got it for Christmas (at 13 months.) Here are my observations of her interactions with each of the items in the kit:

Wooden Coin Bank Set: This has been her favorite material from this kit. She’s used it from the day she opened it until now (8 months later.) The lids are changeable and all three tops come in the kit. The yellow lid is for coins which you get but a happy discovery was that the cards from the wallet inside The Thinker Play Kit fit through the opening, too! The teal lid has 16 small openings but the kit doesn’t include the items to use with this lid. We’ve used coffee stirrers and q-tips and that has worked out well. The green lid with the accompanying carrots are her favorite. The lids are still tough for her to open and click back together (even now, at 21 months) so it’s not totally independent. After using this for four months, we discovered the bottom of the box also comes off to more easily take out the objects from inside.  

Flexible Wooden Stacker: This is her second favorite item and it’s still used nearly every day (at 21 months.) It came with 12 rings, which I felt was too many to keep track of, so I only leave out six rings at a time. It took her a bit to master this material but even then, went back to it again and again. It’s a very attractive activity because of the bright colors!

Circle of Friends Puzzle: Another favorite! She loved this puzzle. From a Montessori perspective, I wish the puzzle pieces were all the same color since the puzzle is focusing on size discrimination not color shading. Montessori materials should isolate concepts rather than mix them so this puzzle doesn’t really align with the method. But I do think it’s a pretty material and it was loved!

Bedtime For Zoe: She LOVES this book. The Lovevery books are incredible. They are so simple with beautiful, realistic illustrations. Also, the concepts are so familiar. One thing that I wasn’t expecting is that Eva becomes very upset on one page where the little girl in the book is getting ready for bed and she gets water in her yes while taking a bath. She actually skips the page now. 🙂

Slide and Sleek Ball Run: If I’m being honest, THIS is the toy that sold ME on the kit. I was so excited for it… and it was a bust! She never played with it. I moved it to different areas of the house, tried to limit the other items around it, I played with it, the other kids played with it — she was just not into it. She didn’t like to put her hand inside the bottom part of the box in order to get the ball out. However, I have many friends whose children LOVED this. So, it could just be Eva. 🙂

Bunnies in a Felt Burrow: This was another material that she could take or leave. She enjoyed the bunnies more than the burrow but had a difficult time getting them out of the burrow. Between 13-15 months she didn’t have the finger dexterity to do it. If I had planned it out, this would have been cute to hold on to and give to her around Easter.

Despite two items being less than stellar for Eva, I’m so glad we got this kit because the other four items were totally worth it. We got so much use out of them and the items she loved then, she is still using now which I think is amazing. 

Have you tried Lovevery?