What can a child learn from sticker activities?

Minali Agarwal June 18, 2020 Toys 0

Until having kids, I’ll be honest I didn’t really see the point of sticker puzzles or activities. I naively thought they were just about pulling stickers off and sticking them in place, and really never understood what children could learn from it or why they enjoy doing it so much. I presumed it was just a good way of keeping kids busy.

However, having now spent many hours playing with sticker books with my daughter – I now get it. They are a brilliant learning resource. Not only do they help children to develop really important skills such as creativity and fine motor skills that actually help them to develop the writing skills in the future.

Children are like magnets to stickers and it’s wonderful to see their creativity and skills grow as they play. Playing with stickers can help kids with so many skill areas! And the best news is, that the children don’t even realize they are working on important developmental areas!

Bilateral Hand Coordination.

It’s an essential skill for so many functional tasks. Zippering a coat, cutting with scissors, and handwriting are all activities that require bilateral hand coordination. Peeling stickers requires tow hands as you hold the sheet with one hand and peel with the dominant hand. Both hands are involved in doing different tasks.

Sensory Exploration.

Explore scents with scratch and sniff stickers. Discover textures of smooth, puffy, scratchy, and fuzzy stickers. Kids are very motivated by stickers, too. Educational stickers are great to use as rewards for good behavior, it’s no wonder why doctors have been using stickers as their secret weapon for decades.

Neat Pincer Grasp.

Stickers are a fine motor powerhouse. Peeling the sticky little pictures requires a neat pincer grasp in order to pull up the edge of a sticker from a sticker sheet. The very tips of the fingers are needed to grip such a small area. For some kids, grasping just the edge of a single sheet of paper is quite difficult. Working with stickers is a great way to practice neat pincer grasp for skills like picking up small beads, string, or a sewing needle.

Spatial Awareness.

Difficulties with spatial awareness can make reading, writing, and functioning in all daily tasks practically impossible. Kids may write with sloppy handwriting or have trouble with organizing their bodies in space. Use stickers as a visual cue for spatial awareness. Kids can see the sticker’s bright color and can use it as a visual cue for where to start writing on a page, how big to form letters. The use of stickers in this area is limitless!

Hand Strength

How can something as small as a sticker work on hand strength? Children need strength in the small muscles of their hands in order to have endurance in coloring, using an open web space when holding a pencil, and when managing buttons and snaps on clothing. Kids can use stickers to build the strength of the intrinsic hand muscles by peeling stickers from resistive surfaces.

Visual Scanning.

Visual scanning is the ability to use vision to search in a systematic manner, such as top to bottom and left to right. A child needs to use visual scanning to avoid obstacles when navigating their environment. This skill is important for daily activities, including reading, writing, drawing, and playing. Kids can scan a sticker sheet to peel off the sticker that they want.

So, get your child involved with sticker collections to work on all of these developmental areas. And, you’ll get to relive your childhood with the scratch-and-sniff, fuzzy, hologram, puffy, foam stickers!

At PepPlay we’ve curated a unique collection of sticker related products that target different developmental areas of children, to help them learn in the most fun way and also in the form of learning and educational toys.