Feeling the Mid Summer Blahs? Here’s a quick activity to do with your kids that is pretty open ended, easy and frugal. Make & Takes shared the idea for writing sticker rebus stories today and I immediately ran to our little crafting cabinet and pulled all of our sheets of stickers that I’ve been halfheartedly stock piling over the years. We always seem to accumulate extra sheets of stickers at birthday parties or through magazines and craft kits and I save whatever I can for a rainy day.

We’re sticking close to home today because both kids have a runny nose – probably nothing but one day of rest never hurt anyone so after letting them watch a few tv shows after breakfast, I wanted a quick & easy craft type project that they could do, preferably with minimal involvement on my part! This project was perfect. I scattered a half dozen sticker sheets on the dining room table and asked, in my very best Super Excited Mom Voice:

“Have you ever made sticker stories before?”

They were immediately excited to see what I meant so I pulled out a sheet of notebook paper and started writing a story (see the image at the top of the collage above). My eldest son, MM (age 7) read along as I wrote so when I asked what should happen next he immediately had ideas. I showed them both how you could use the stickers as inspiration for what should happen next in the story. I wrote out a quick paragraph to illustrate the idea and then let them take the idea and run with it.

MM immediately wanted to write a Star Wars story (you can see snippets above) and my nearly 4 year old daughter, BB, was super excited to use the Elmo Stickers. I could have sat and helped her write a story but she tends to be pretty independent with her projects so I let her do her own thing and just have fun playing with the stickers and “pretending to write”.

Both were incredibly proud of their results and I loved getting to see an example of my son’s handwriting (it’s always this messy – just like his dad!)  and also his spelling and story writing skill. He actually wrote a pretty well thought out story considering he was flying by the seat of his pants and had no help from me at all. My daughter’s little sticker collage is just adorable and I loved the little squiggles of mock handwriting throughout.

You could make this concept as challenging or open ended as you wanted really and different themed stickers will yield different stories and results, obviously. I thought this was such a great idea and it was the perfect cure for a lazy summer morning – plus it’ll keep your kids’ minds active during the summer months.

This is definitely an idea to keep in your back pocket!