It doesn’t matter what season it is, our kids will find a way to be bored. In the winter they are snowbound and fighting the cabin fever. During the summer they’re hot and bothered, laying around the house and getting under your feet.

As parents, we feel we should be taking the kids out and providing them with meaningful, educational activities to stimulate their little minds. However, the reality is that work, chores, exhaustion, budget, and a total disinterest in dragging a bunch of complaining, squabbling kids around an attraction they said they wanted to go to, conspire to have you stay at home.

So, what can you do?

Luckily, Dorling Kindersley has the solution to this problem with its range of Ultimate Sticker Books and Ultimate Sticker Collections.

Now.

Regular readers know I have a not so secret love affair with Dorling Kindersley books. They not only have something for every occasion but they have something for every interest and every age group. I am always excited to have new DK offerings to add to our shelves, and the set of sticker books we received for review was no exception.

DK sent us four of the sticker books; Space, Dinosaurs, LEGO City, and LEGO Friends. In addition to these titles, DK is offering a diverse range of sticker books including; “Things That Go Sticker Encyclopedia”, “Baby Animals Sticker Encyclopedia”, “Disney Pixar Cars Ultimate Sticker Collection”, “Frozen Ultimate Sticker Book”, and the “Avengers Assemble Ultimate Sticker Collection”.

These are not the sticker books of my childhood where you spend 20 minutes peeling off stickers that rip and once they are in place, you are done. These are so much more fun.

When I asked the littles which book they would like to try out first, Evey went straight for LEGO Friends. This sticker book has over 1000 reusable stickers, not all of which are needed for the scenes in the book. This leaves plenty of stickers to put on your favourite notebooks, storage boxes, and, if you are Evey, all up and down your arms!

Ultimate Sticker Collection: LEGO® Friends contains more than one thousand full-color reusable stickers of all the LEGO® Friends mini-doll characters and their accessories, pets, and favourite places. The book is packed full of information about the girls of Heartlake City; readers can find out about each characters’ likes and dislikes, pets, special talents, and the city they live in. Lively captions provide bite-size LEGO Friends facts, while caption headings match up with the labels on the sticker pages, providing extra help for children to complete their sticker books. The recommended age range for this book is 5 – 12 years, and it has proved very popular with her classmates at school.

The theory was that Gabriel would get the other three sticker books, but that was not to be! A certain older brother, who shall remain nameless because he is in his twenties…. laid claim to the LEGO City book!

All the fun of LEGO® City comes together in this incredible, super-sized sticker collection. The book features more than 1,000 stickers from the popular LEGO City line of toys. Planes, trains, fire trucks, and construction machines make for hours of sticky LEGO fun. Unfortunately for Gabriel, the recommended age range for this one is 5 – 17 years – allowing his 15-year-old brother to say that he should ‘test’ it from the older end of the age spectrum – and so I can say from experience, older kids love these sticker books too.

If you are already familiar with the DK sticker books, this is not a new Space book; it is the previously published version with a new cover. At 16 pages, Space – The Ultimate Sticker Book this was smaller than the other books, but Gabriel loves it. It was a great prop in his speech therapy – one of his few clear words is “Moon” and being able to naturally add other words for him to pronounce through the use of this book was great. The only drawback was that he then wanted to put all of the stickers on the wall above his bed.

I distracted him from that by giving him Dinosaurs.

Created in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution, Ultimate Sticker Activity Collection: Dinosaurs introduces children six and up to the prehistoric world with thirty-two pages of reusable dinosaur stickers as well as a full range of other activities including mazes, jigsaws, mix-and-match, spotters, and fill-the-scene sections.

Gabriel, of course, went straight for the mazes, and that was something I liked about this book – the addition of puzzles and activities. As in the other books, the stickers are of excellent quality and are genuinely reusable. This is a great bonus for Gabriel as he will place and replace a sticker over and over until he is satisfied that it is the ‘right’ place.

I cannot recommend these highly enough. You can find out more about the books above, and all of the other amazing sticker books on the DK website and they are available on Amazon and in all good bookshops.

Let me know which books your littles enjoy.

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