Melissa & Doug Sticker Collection

Melissa & Doug

“Over 23 years ago we started our company in the garage of the home where Doug grew up… Our philosophy has remained the same over the years–to make each and every customer a happy and permanent member of the Melissa & Doug family, while offering products with tremendous value, quality and design. Our line offers something for everyone with over 1,000 innovative products for children of all ages!” from www.melissaanddoug.com.

Although, clearly well established. I’d not heard of Melissa & Doug previous to this sticker set but I think this is brilliant and is definitely a range I’ll be checking out in the future.

Melissa & Doug’s Sticker Collection - Blue

The book comes with 10 large pages of themed stickers. The pages look like they are approximately A3 in size. The sticker themes are: construction, sports, outer space, dinosaurs, pirates, zoo animals, racing vehicles, knights, ‘gross stuff’ and rescue. I think this sticker set is definitely aimed at boys although I’m sure girls would enjoy using many of the stickers too. There are other Melissa & Doug sets that are more aimed at girls.

Why did I buy them?

Throughout university I’ve known that I want to work with children once qualified, so whenever I see anything I think might be useful I buy it to build up my stash of resources. My mam has often contributed to this too, and came in with this set of stickers earlier in the year. She also bought me the set of more ‘girly’ stickers. At the time I was working with mainly boys so we decided to give the ‘pink’ stickers to my niece for Christmas. In January I started with a 7-year-old for intervention based research for my dissertation and these stickers were so useful! I still have lots left too so can use them with other children when I (finally!) get a paediatric speech and language therapy job.

My Opinion

I think these stickers are great and they have been extremely useful. I was working on sound awareness with the boy during my dissertation and saw him twice weekly for 6 weeks. I needed simple ideas which would keep him on task and these stickers proved very useful. I used them in several of the sessions. For a set activity, he would be presented with a piece of A4 coloured card and a selection of stickers (e.g. pirates or outer space) and every time he segmented a word into syllables, identified the first sound in a word (or whatever else the task aimed to achieve) he could choose a sticker to make up a picture. He then took the sticker scene home at the end of the session.

I cut the large sheets into smaller ones with enough stickers for the activity. For example if I knew I was using 10 words I’d cut 10-11 stickers from the larger sheet. Most of the sheets could be split into 3 in this way, leaving enough selection for a sticker scene. Not all the sheets are suitable for use in this way but we had a nice selection for the weeks we worked together. I usually gave a choice of two sticker scenes and he particularly liked the pirate stickers. These stickers included pirates, pirate ships, palm trees and gold coins etc. He also like the outer space stickers, which included a variety of aliens and planets.

The stickers come in a wide range of different sizes, shapes and colours. They are easy to peel from the sheets (although the boy I was working with had difficulty with some of them so I started to peel them and he finished it). They also stick well to the paper or card and don’t fall off the page.

The boy I was working with clearly enjoyed using these stickers. It was an easy task for me to organise and kept his attention focused (he wanted to attempt the word in order to get the next sticker for his picture).

All of the characters in the stickers are male (e.g. sports people and fire fighters). This could be seen as a little sexist, although personally this doesn’t bother me as this is a set of stickers that looks like it is primarily aimed at boys. As long as the children using the stickers know that these roles can be male or female in real life then I don’t think it would be an issue. I think some young boys might like the fact that there are no girls in the stickers (if they are at the age of ‘ewww, girls!’)

Ideas for use

I’m sure you have your own ideas about how the stickers could be used, and I’m sure the list of possibilities is endless (almost!) but here are a few ideas I’ve had:

• Reward charts (after a child has gained a certain number of stars, they could choose one of these for their chart)
• Sticker scenes for fun or as part of a structured activity (as described above)
• Make a sticker scene and then write about it
• Decorate toys or other belongings (with adult permission of course!)
• Stick them to yourself (sounds like fun to me!)

Good Points

• Lots of uses
• Colourful
• Appealing to children
• Good variety of stickers
• Good quality
• Great value for money

Not-so-good points (they aren’t bad points though!)

• Some of the stickers a little trickier for children to peel off themselves
• All of the characters in the stickers are male (?) (e.g. sports people and fire fighters).

Would I recommend them?

Yes absolutely! The stickers are good quality and great value for money. There are lots of uses for the stickers, whether used educationally or just for fun these stickers will provide hours of entertainment for children. I have lots of stickers left for future activities, and I wish I’d kept the girly stickers for my resource box so I have a choice. I’ll definitely be buying more from this range in the future!

Availability

Currently available on Amazon for £4.95 (the front cover says ‘with over 500 stickers’ therefore that’s less than 1p per sticker! That’s what I call great value!

Thanks for reading! :-)