Sticker Learning

Stickers are amazing learning tools! We have used them for so many teaching opportunities, all through play. This is one activity that never gets old, perhaps because you can easily switch up your stickers and teaching material. In this activity, stickers are used to name body parts. I think that dot stickers are best for this type of learning so that the picture on the sticker does not distract from the body part.

Items needed:

Stickers (any type will work if you do not have the dot stickers!)

Steps:

Place a dot sticker on whatever body part you are teaching and name the part.

Take turns placing the stickers on each other. Ask your toddler to place the stickers on specific body parts on you, themselves or a stuffed animal.

To make the activity more challenging, be more specific. For example, you could ask your toddler to place the pink sticker on the teddy bear’s nose or place the blue sticker on the teddy bear’s paw.

I highly recommend beefing up your sticker stash. They are great for sensory focus. Toddlers love to explore the various textures and find a lot of the colors and images visually stimulating. Incorporating them into play and teachable moments is a breeze!

Amazon sells sensory sticker playsets, but you can easily make your own if you want to have a bigger collection of various types of stickers. This particular kit has a variety of different types of stickers: foil, fuzzy, puffy, smooth, scented and sparkly; however, there are only 100 stickers, which go quicker than you would think!

Stickers are a fantastic tool for developing fine motor skills. All of the peeling is great for fine tuning their pincer grasp. This activity also enables your toddler to hone their bilateral hand coordination (the skill of using both hands concurrently to perform a task). Another major skill that is boosted by playing with stickers is visual scanning, the oculomotor skill that allows us to search and make decisions about visual stimuli in a systematic manner.

We have an occupational therapist in the family, and he has preached about the benefits of stickers before my daughter was even old enough to play with them. Sticker learning can be as challenging as you create it to be and can be accomplished utilizing a multitude of approaches.