The Explore Box (£8 + £2 postage) is for kids aged 6+ and contains a least an hour’s worth of fun science.

The Investigate Box (£22 + £2 postage) for kids aged 8+ has more experiments and more items of collectible lab equipment with enough to keep a junior scientist busy for 3 or 4 hours.

Both kits have full-colour illustrated instructions and online videos to make it easy to do all the experiments.

My lovely helper is my daughter, Little C, who has just turned seven! I was sent an Explore Box, which is perfectly designed for her age group.

Yes, it fits through the letterbox!

Plus bonus trivia!

These look like they could be fun.

Let’s check out the projects!

First up, the Pico-pault.

We will be making a catapult and throwing a little pompom Pico.

Stacking and securing the lolly sticks.

(Please excuse the grimy nails; it was rugby at school today.)

This was quite tricky. We made the elastic band too tight at first, and couldn’t get the spoon in! 

Hi Pico!

(Sorry, he’s a bit blurry.)

And he’s ready to go!

It worked!

OK, next.

The Elasti-copter was interesting.

 After cutting out the cardboard shape, it was time to assemble. Paperclip, glue dots, rotor, elastic band.

But did it work?

 We decided it was too heavy.

So we used a paper version instead.

I’d love to give you another video, as this one was much more successful! Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to film it. But yes, it did work.

Anyway, on to the next one.

Under Pressure.

(Doesn’t this instantly conjure the amazing song by Queen?)

Anything with balloons is always going to be fun!

Hurray, balloon!

Attaching the little tube was interesting…

The idea was to see if the inflated balloon would inflate the uninflated balloon when the clip was removed. 

Again, no video for this one, but it didn’t work, the red balloon didn’t inflate.

Or does that mean the experiment did, in fact, work?

What do you think?

OK, the last experiment was the best.

Yes, it’s making a Gloveophone! Creating a working musical instrument with nothing more than a straw, latex glove, plastic pipe, and a bit of tape.

This was before we added the straw. The temptation to just blow up the glove was too great!

Isn’t that something? 

It took quite a lot of fiddling to get it to work, but we eventually got the hang of it, more or less.

Now, while I don’t have pictures of the process of making it, I do have video!

That’s quite a sound huh?

We experimented with changing the note too.

Exhausting!

The helicopter was interesting, and we were glad we did get one to fly. Because it was quite flimsy (paper being very light) it didn’t work too well after crash-landing near the stove. It also took some perseverance to get it right. However the final effect was still fun. The principle was also very similar to the lovely flying butterfly bonus gift in last month’s box, so that was a nice thing to link up with.

The Under Pressure experiment was slightly less satisfactory, simply because it didn’t do anything! Of course it’s still useful to see when something doesn’t have quite the outcome you think it will, but Little C had the most fun blowing up the balloons.

As for the Gloveophone, it’s simply brilliant. We had a lot of fun experimenting with different sounds, and while the instructions provided beautiful explanations of how it worked, the main interest was making funny noises! 

I just love Letterbox Lab. It combines some incredibly entertaining and interesting activities with educational value, even when the kids don’t notice they’re learning! This is a wonderful way of getting kids into science, and many of the things they will pick up will resonate later on when they’re doing more formal learning at school

Every Letterbox Lab box we try we always have an enormous amount of fun, and this one is no exception! Creating a musical(ish) instrument was an extra bonus. 

And now I have a bonus for you…