Unboxing: Review of OwlCrate Jr. June 2019

“Time Travel”

The theme for OwlCrate Jr’s June box was “Time Travel” and as you can guess, it included all kinds of goodies centred around going back in time!

Included in this month’s box was one of three different Professor Noggins trivia games – we got Medieval Times. This is a really fun trivia game with full colour, illustrated cards centred around all things Medieval. There are two degrees of difficulty including easy and hard and can be played simultaneously to customize players of differing skill levels. My family has really enjoyed playing this game and it would make an excellent travel game for long car rides!

Next is the item my daughter was most excited for – Hermione’s Time Turner magnetic brooch from Juniper & Ivy Designs. It’s a really well done brooch, it’s Harry Potter … specifically Hermione’s … what more is there to say?

This multi-coloured dinosaur pleather pencil pouch is just too cool for school. I’m always game for more pouches because I can always find uses for them – especially when traveling or organizing my daughter’s room and desk!

The last goodie this month was an iron on Time Traveler patch designed by Erin Gibbs – which we quickly added to our collection of OwlCrate Jr patches on my daughters backpack.

Lastly we have the paper items and this months book – Time Sight by Lynne Jonell. A historical fiction adventure that takes us back in time to medieval Scotland! I don’t think we’ve read a historical fiction middle grade yet and are very excited to dive in.

The paper goodies include the month’s spoiler card, next month’s theme card – Zodiac Adventures, and the mini magazine with author interview, puzzles, book recommendations and more!

Overall Rating: A

1. Professor Noggin’s Medieval Times Card Game: 3/3

2. Juniper + Ivy Design Wooden Time Turner Brooch: 3/3

3. Dinosaur pencil pouch: 2/3 (Our pencil pouch is somewhat faulty as the lining is too big for the bag and keeps getting caught in the zipper. This unfortunately seems to be a design flaw as my niece’s box also has this problem.)

4. Time Traveler Patch: 2.5/3 I personally love this patch and patches in general … however they are never my daughter’s favourite item so I brought down the rating to reflect that. But you can’t please everyone and this is just a personal preference!

Overall it is another exciting box from OwlCrate Jr and I can’t recommend them highly enough. Each month is carefully curated with high quality and engaging items to further the theme of the book. This year, OwlCrate Jr has been selecting a wide variety of titles to include in the boxes and it has been a treat to be exposed to different genres outside of middle grade fantasy!

Note on Rating: I rate each item out of 3 possible points: 1 for quality, 1 for usefulness, and 1 for if I personally liked the item/fandom. I then assign an overall letter rating for the whole box.