National Geographic Dig Kits & Crystal Garden Review
Ad – Gifted for review
With the potential on the horizon for schools to close down for a few months, now seems like a good time to see what’s out there in terms of fun and educational activities to do at home with the kids!
We were sent some of the awesome range of National Geographic educational kits to try out. Here they are:
As you can see, we had the Crystal Garden kit, along with three different National Geographic dig kits – Dino Fossil, Gemstone and the mini Shark Tooth. The Crystal Garden kit was the one that first caught Joshua’s eye…
National Geographic Crystal Garden Kit
This kit was very different to the rest in that it doesn’t involve any digging! What it does involve is colouring and pouring and crystal growing.
To start with, you decorate your trees with the included pens in whatever colours / patterns you fancy. The pens are quite small so this can take a little while depending how neatly to choose to do your colouring!
Once the tree is decorated you slot it together onto the stand and pour some magical crystal growing solution over the top and in the base of the tray.
And then you wait.
After 30 minutes you can see some crystals forming and after around 8 hours the whole tree is adorned. Here’s the finished result:
It didn’t end up quite as fully covered as the picture on the box but we both agreed it looked pretty damn cool regardless.
The tree isn’t designed to last forever and the crystals will crack off if you disturb it too much but our one has sat there happily looking pretty funky for a day or so now. We also still have the other tree to make yet, so at £10 I thought it was pretty decent value for something which is a bit different.
National Geographic Dig Kits
The three dig kits we tried out were all very similar in concept. The kits contained some basic excavation equipment and a plaster block containing some goodies to dig out.
Before you start make sure you pick a suitable area in which to undertake the dig, because it’s a touch on the messy side! So ideally outdoors, but if not make sure you’ve got a tray or mat down to work on.
As you dig through the plaster mould you will discover three distinct objects in the big packs and one object in the mini pack.
In the crystal pack you’ll find three different crystals.
In the dinosaur kit you’ll find some fossils – a bone, a tooth and some poo – and in the mini shark dig kit you’ll find a shark tooth!
Joshua had a lot of fun digging and was really interested in the various objects he successfully dug out. You can look up each one in the included booklets which adds some more education to it all and they are nice things to collect too. Joshua carried all of his finds around in his pocket all day, so he was clearly happy!
Overall Thoughts
We had a really fun day playing with the National Geographic STEM Science Kits. Even though each pack is a one-time use situation, you get some fun things to keep at the end of it and learn some interesting things too.
Each of the full-sized packs retail for around the £10 mark, with the mini kits coming in a few quid cheaper.
You can currently WIN a Crystal Garden set through our Instagram giveaway until the end of March 2020. Pop along to our Instagram page to enter!
You can find them in most major retailers, including Amazon (affiliate links below).
For more reviews please pop along to our Reviews & Giveaways page.