Therapy with Stickers

One of the things Chelsea loves is stickers! She LOVES doing things with stickers, so several of our therapy activities revolve around them, plus- stickers are AWESOME for pincer grasp, which took Chelsea years to fully master! Some of our favorite activities include:

1. Color matching stickers! One of the Christmas break activities we did this year was making snowmen in several different ways. One of them was doing a matching color snowman, and putting the right colored dots on the outline of a snowman! Then we would draw on features once we were done.

2. Cross midline to peel off stickers! This is SO good for your brain! Often, kids with learning disabilities will switch things from hand to hand in the middle, rather than crossing across their body. My favorite way to combat this is to put stickers on the child's upper arms. That way, they HAVE to cross the opposite arm to reach the stickers!

3. Make designs with circle stickers! This one makes a great busy bag for restaurants or waiting in line- just cut paper or cardstock into fourths, then draw a design or letter out of little circles, and have the child place the stickers to form a letter! This works hand-eye coordination. You can also get super educational and put stickers that start with T (turtle) onto a T outline, etc.

4. Group like stickers! This is especially fun with animals. Classify big/ little, or noisy/ quiet, or farm/ jungle, or colorful/ earth tones... So many choices! I like the Melissa/ Doug re-useable stickers for this activity, which also are amazing because they stick to windows!!!

5. Create a scene and write a story! Let the creative juices flow! I like the paper that is half for drawing/ putting on stickers, half for writing- and write a sentence or two (dictated by Chelsea) that Chelsea then traces, and tells. This works cognitive by thinking of a story, speech- telling the story, fine motor- tracing the words, and then social skills in a show/ tell method.

I just know Chelsea will get to the "Dot on ___" of reading!

6. "Dot on _______" There are SO MANY dot-shaped stickers, and "dot" is easy for Chelsea to say. So an easy go-to speech activity for us is putting dots onto target words and saying "Dot on boat" or "Dot on hummus". It can be easily changed with "Minnie Mouse on _____" or "Mommy on _____", but dot stickers are much cheaper and more common!