Stickers

[mumofone]

Ok so what else would i be thinking of on a friday night but err stickers! I just wondered what peoples opinions are on these? My little ones love them. They seem to be good for UTW, C&L, Literacy, Maths, PD but are thought of as the same as colouring in pages that ive heard can be seen as setting little ones up to fail. What are your thoughts? I like them - theyre clean, easy and keep them amused!

[Mouse]

The children here love stickers! They also love colouring sheets and I have no plans to get rid of either just because someone's decided they're not good enough!

[Ellisha]

Ok so what else would i be thinking of on a friday night but err stickers! I just wondered what peoples opinions are on these? My little ones love them. They seem to be good for UTW, C&L, Literacy, Maths, PD but are thought of as the same as colouring in pages that ive heard can be seen as setting little ones up to fail. What are your thoughts? I like them - theyre clean, easy and keep them amused!

I like them too and they're good fur developing fine motor skills. I don't have them out a lot but I like to vary activities provided.

[FloraDora]

Mine tend to use stickers to start a picture or enhance it.

For instance I have animal stickers that they use for maths usually and draw fields for the different animals, sorting, setting, counting and scribbling around them.

Shape stickers are good for sorting and learning the properties of shape, tesselation etc... I have previously made by the children sticker shape pictures that they can copy- by putting the 2d wooden shapes that are the same size on top or to the side or just recreate picture or do their own with the shape stickers.

No envelope in the writing area gets away without stickers being attached before being given to the recipient.

My creative little one will draw a picture then enhance it with stickers and craft items.

We buy a magazine once a month and the stickers focus them to listen, look, count etc...

So I think there is a place for stickers, but I am not a big fan of peel and stick randomly - a good 'occupier' and good for finer motor skills, the finger and thumb movement needed to peel gets a lot of exercise though.

[Maza]

Mine have used them when playing 'school'. Some mindees went to nursery for part of the week and so were used to seeing teachers reward them with stickers. The cuddly toys here are usually the pupils and get given stickers for 'being good'. The children like the power of being in control of the stickers and it's rather interesting seeing what the teddies are being rewarded for! My DD currently has a 'house points chart' that she made on her bedroom door and has put all her toys into 'houses/teams'. Each day she gets home from school and asks me who has been good and deserves a sticker on the chart. I use this opportunity to verbalise an example of a kind act so for example "Midnight deserves a sticker because she tried to cheer up Snowflake who was very upset".

They are good to have around as an open ended resource to enhance creative work in general. The other day all the cuddly toys were wearing black paper cups upside down on their heads. The 'hats' had been covered in star stickers and made very convincing wizard hats. I would never have thought of this idea and the star stickers have been hanging around in the sticker basket for over a year just waiting for the perfect opportunity to bring some imaginative play to life.

Another lovely 'pinterest' activity which I keep meaning to get round to is decorating a rolling pin with foam stickers and then using them as rollers in paint.

I also copied an idea where instead of presenting the children with blank paper on an easel, you could pop a sticker or two on the easel paper and invite the children to add to it - either with markers, paint more stickers or whatever. So you might add a couple of planet stickers, or some flower stickers, a rainbow, whatever. You could build a scene together. Adding a pair of googly eyes (and nothing else) works well too!

When I had a couple of early talkers I made a couple of simple blank books and we stuck a sticker on each page. I used a pack of owl stickers for one and so we talked about what the owl was doing on each page with the learning intention being to use 'two word' sentences, so "owl flying", "owl sleeping" etc. Obviously I would be modelling the whole sentence.

I think stickers are such a readily available resource - they often come free with things or come in party bags etc and so it is a shame not to use them.