Fine motor activity: stickers

If you shop at Guardian, Giant or TMC, they currently give out stamps (stickers) for every RMx amount purchased.

Over the past month, I've collected quite a lot of those stickers. I do not intend to redeem the stickers for anything from the shops (except for a soft toy from Guardian, simply because I bought many tins of his expensive milk powder which had a good discount)

What I intended to do was to use them for my son to practice his fine motor. It's a 'free' activity if you do shop at those places.

I chose to only keep the Guardian card on which to stick the stamps as it seemed less daunting - up to the number 40.  The cards of the other shops has over a hundred little boxes.

He does only 5-10 stickers at a time after which he seems to lose his patience. These stickers are easier for him to peel off as he just needs to bend the backing paper. Proper cartoon sticker sheets or sticker books are a bigger challenge for him because he has to be very precise on where he places the fingers of both hands.

Furthermore, the backing paper here is very narrow so it is very much easier to manouvere. For large sticker sheets, he struggles to peel off the stickers in the centre of the sheet.

He still has difficulty adjusting his wrist to get the sticker into a horizontal position prior to placing it in the numbered box. I sometimes hold his hand and adjust the positioning.

He no longer wants to paste the stickers sequentially. I'm not sure if that's because he's bored with doing so, or because it's hard for him to focus when there are so many numbers on a small card. So, I use my fingers to cover the other numbers on the same row and the row below, which does help him paste it on my chosen target box.

Apart from fine motor benefits, you can use it to teach numbers. You can do straight forward numbers, or do counting two by two, or three by three etc. You can use it for sequencing e.g. blue, orange, green, blue, orange, green...what comes next?

You can also teach them the concept of delayed gratification with this, cos you'll need a lot of patience as you may need to collect lots of stamps before being able to redeem anything useful (you may need to create some excitement to keep your little one still interested)

We first did this activity last year when Guardian ran it in conjunction with the 80th anniversary of the 100 Acre Wood (Pooh Bear). So, if you happen to miss this, just wait a while for them to run it again, or just keep an eye out for other retailers who might run a similar redemption programme.