Thursday 23 August 2012

Toddler art - Five things to do with foam stickers

I found a big bucket of foam animal stickers at Riot Art & Craft for $3.74.



When I opened the tub, I discovered two things: (1) there are hundreds in there and (2) they smell bad.

What to do with all these stickers?

1. Stick them!
The first thing that we did was stick them! Miss 1 was awake, so I started peeling off the backs and giving them to her to stick on paper.



Eventually, we both concluded that I wasn't peeling fast enough, so she set about drawing pictures and I started peeling stickers and sticking them on a plastic container so that they would be easy to get hold of later.



Once we had a good collection and Miss 1.5 was up, the "twins" made collages. Then, when Miss 1 was sleeping, Miss 1.5 stuck them all to herself. She worked out very quickly how to peel off the backs, clever girl.



2. Learning animals.
The "twins" are very good at animal noises and are starting to learn animal names as well. I set up paper with one of the seven animals on it and asked the girls to pick which was the cat, etc, and what noise it made. Full points all around. Then I asked them what each animal was. Miss 1 got dog and fish, Miss 1.5 got kitty, puppy, horse, fish, bird and pig. Rabbits are hard, but Miss 1.5 eventually setted on bunny.


3. Learning colours.
Miss 1 was having another nap so Miss 1.5 and I worked on colours. She's come a long way from everything being "blue" and can now pick out red, blue and brown with certainty. Yellow and green are nearly there. Orange and pink are hard.



When pointing out colours becomes boring, Miss 1.5 is also adept at peeling off the correct colour.



4. Stamping.
I've been collecting bottle caps and my neighbour just gave me a whole pile more.


The stickers were a bit too big for the milk bottle caps, except for the bones, but yoghurt lids were a good size.


With paint dollops on ice cream container lids, the girls set about stamping. They added in biscuit cutters for more shapes.


Super messy and super fun! The stamps didn't make perfect imprints in their hands, since toddlers are a bit sloppy, but they enjoyed themselves anyway and didn't even require a bath afterwards.

5. Tell a story.
I drew scenes and the girls add the animals (and some extra drawings) to tell a story.



In this one, the pig is in the mud, the fish is in the water, the cat is in the flower bed, the bird is in the tree, the rabbit is watching the bird, the horse is visiting the house, the dog is riding in the car...

We still have lots of stickers left.

Any other ideas for what we should do with them?

2 comments:

  1. I love your ideas! I see these foam stickers everywhere but haven't thought of any uses for them. Thank you for the inspiration!

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