Creative Play for Babies & Toddlers: Sticky Art

This simple creative play activity is so much fun for babies who are sitting or standing and younger toddlers. As I share in my new book, Time to Create, the process of doing in play or creative activities is so much more important for young children than the end result, and this activity provided AJ (at twelve months of age) with lots of opportunity to ‘do.’

I prepared a small basket with some flattened patty pans/cupcake wrappers which I had cut into halves and quarters.

I lifted the corners of the backing sheet of a piece of clear, self adhesive book covering and taped it (sticky side out) to the window, removing the backing sheet once we were ready to start.

I showed AJ that the surface was sticky and how to push the patty pan to the book covering so that it would stick. She had a wonderful time pressing the patty pans onto the surface and as soon as she saw that we had a bit of a collection going she started pulling them off again.

And pushing them on and pulling them off and pushing them on and pulling them off. You can see lots of little finger prints on the sticky surface as testimony to this.

At one stage our sticky art looked like the photo above but it wasn’t for long. I left it hanging in the playroom, together with the basket and a few leftover patty pans and AJ came back to it many times in the days that followed, to push on or pull off more of the wrappers until all I was left with was a blank sheet of sticky book covering decorated with fingerprints. The wonderful thing about process art is that it doesn’t matter, as it was the process that was most important and we sure had a lot of fun with the doing!

Have you tried sticky art with your little person?