Paint by Sticker Kids

Sticker Mosaics

My partner snagged a Paint by Sticker book designed especially for kids, thinking my art obsessed middle child would love it. Since she’s figured it out, she’s been pleasantly obsessed with it, and she isn’t the only one.

These sticker by number books remind me of the color by number activity books you may have seen. In those, you can’t quite tell how the picture will turn out until you get all the numbered spaces filled in with the assigned colors. In the case of the Paint by Sticker book, you can tell the final product before you start in most cases. But it doesn’t give you any sense of how it looks when finished.

Each “painting” page has a white outline with numbered spaces on a brightly colored solid background. Kids find the accompanying sticker page, identified by a small icon in the top right that matches the page that needs filling. The sticker page has stickers numbered in order, though the white page has numbers in no discernible order. Kids start stickering and lo and behold, they have a mosaic of colors at the end.

Some of the tiny stickers can be hard to handle, and my six year old needed some assistance removing them from the sticker page. She did all the placement herself, though. The blank page requires rotating and aligning the stickers properly, so it works great for visual orientation practice and takes some concentration. It turns out best using hard surfaces so kids can apply the stickers firmly. It requires zero literacy skills, but a fair bit of patience.

This quiet activity would probably work great for airplane rides. Both the sticker and decorating pages can be torn out so kids don’t need to flip back and forth constantly to apply stickers. Car rides might jostle too much since decorating requires very precise placement of the stickers. But that may depend on the kid, the trip, and whether or not kids have a work surface like these travel trays.

Kids versions of these sticker books (they make ones for adults, too!) come in zoo animals, under the sea, bugs, and unicorns & magic themes as well as the original book. Each picture has around 50 stickers to apply, with ten pictures per book. Overall, I love the final creations and approve of the quantity – enough to have and share, but not so much the activity gets old or we end up with a giant stack of pages I can’t bring myself to recycle.