Repurposing a Sticker Book

       I recently purchased my son his first sticker book.  It was a construction site, so he was absolutely enamored with it.  Unfortunately, I was very disappointed in the quality of the stickers.  They were basically a one-time use, so after he placed each one in the book, it was done for.  I decided that he needed color forms, remember those?  I searched for them, and I was very disappointed with the selection that I could found.  Finally, I came up with an idea to salvage the sticker book.
    I turned the sticker book into a magnetic play kit.  I mounted the stickers on magnets, wrapped the sticker book pages in contact paper, grabbed a cookie sheet and a shirt box, and tada!  We had a brand new toy!  I’ve outlined our process below.

I started out by placing some stickers on cardboard, covering them with contact paper, cutting them out, and then adding stick on circular magnets to the back.  After a little while, I wised up.  I just stuck the stickers directly on the $3 magnetic canvas, shown above, and cut them out.  After two weeks, they've held up almost as well as the stickers mounted on cardboard, and it took less than half the time.  

Next, I tore the scene pages out of the sticker book.  They were two pages wide, so I carefully tore them out, and taped them together on the back.  After that, I trimmed the edges so that each scene would fit nicely in one of our old worn out cookie sheets.  Finally, I covered them with contact paper.  At first, I tried to cover the front and back of the pages with the contact paper, but I found that it blocked too much of the magnetic pull, so I just covered the front and wrapped the contact paper around the edges of the pages.  

Finally, I found a shirt box from the basement where we could store all of the pieces and my son went to town.  He loves changing the scenes and gliding the pieces along each one.  

This also makes a great out at dinner toy for a child who is still too little to be entertained by the coloring placemats.