I recently purchased a book of reusable puppy stickers from Mastermind Toys – Eyelike Stickers: Puppies. I’m a big fan of reusable stickers as a therapy activity for children, and I particularly love this collection.
Many sticker books just have animals or characters that are merely posing. While this is alright for an activity book outside of therapy, we S-LPs need stickers that provide opportunities for children to comment using speech sounds, vocabulary, and grammatical forms and functions that they are working on in therapy. We use games and activities very purposefully to set a child up to have repeated opportunities to practice their speech and language goals.
With this particular book, the puppies are doing a variety of actions and interacting with objects. There is also a large variety of objects such as dog toys, food, houses, and accessories. I’ve used them for speech goals such as word final /g/ and initial /d/ (‘dog’) and for a variety of language goals such as:
· auxiliary is/are / present continuous (‘the dog is running’)
· action words (running, wearing, sitting, stretching, sleeping, yawning, hiding, eating, playing, etc.)
· comparative adjectives (longer, bigger, darker, etc.)
· same / different concept
· adjectives (dark, fluffy, happy, etc.)
· prepositions (on, beside, between, next to, in front of, under, behind, in, etc.)
· categorizing (dogs, toys, homes, foods, etc.)
· subject-verb-object sentences (‘the dog is wearing glasses’)
In addition to being useful for working on specific speech and language goals, these stickers are also useful as a reinforcer or break game. It is motivating, fun, quick, and easy to maintain control of the pieces. The pictures of the stickers here were taken after my 4-year-old niece and I were playing with them. I was cutting them out at her house and she took a keen interest in them. She had a great time organizing them and arranging the dogs to interact with each other.
Finally, since there are so many stickers provided, including duplications, it’s alright if a sticker is wrecked. Also, I can give some in a baggy to clients for home practice.
As with any great toy or activity, these Eyelike Stickers are not without their limitations. S-LPs need reusable stickers that are tough enough to withstand the use of many young not-so-gentle hands and that are quick to remove from the scene boards. These stickers tend to rip more easily and are more difficult to remove from the scene boards than other brands such as Melissa and Doug reusable stickers. I merely overcame this limitation by laminating the sheets of stickers and cutting them out to arrange instead. Despite this one issue, I am a huge fan of this sticker book.
For all of these reasons, the Eyelike Stickers: Puppies have become one of my favourite things.
