Sticky Wall Adventures

I recently revisited and revamped one of our oldies but goodies, and I wanted to share it with you. I took the idea of the Sticky Story Board and combined it with an idea I'd seen making the rounds on Pinterest. It seemed simple enough; put your contact paper up on the window or wall (sticky side out) and then stick pom poms on it. I got everything all set up and plunked Erik down in front of the "sticky wall" (as we've taken to calling it) with a bowl of pom poms and let him figure out what to do with them. He immediately started sticking pom poms to the wall and thought it was great fun. But then the pom poms all started jumping off the wall. :( I don't know if it was the fact that my contact paper is getting old, or if there's something wrong with the cheap dollar store pom poms I bought, but those darn things wouldn't stick for more than a few seconds.

 Luckily Erik was still entertained for a few minutes at least. He even dug out his little tongs and tried using those to put the pom poms on the wall. He gave up after just a couple of minutes, and I never did get him interested in putting the pom poms on the wall again, even though I left them available for a few days.
Unwilling to let the sticky wall go to waste, I pulled out my foam sheets from my stash and cut out some shapes to stick to the wall. I also pulled the contact paper up from the wall and drew on a few details with a marker on the back side of the paper. Here's what we ended up with:

Erik loved this! I purposely made each train car a different shape and color than all the rest. We got to work on expanding his vocabulary by talking about the different kinds of cars, as well as the different colors. It was a couple of weeks before he finally lost interest and the contact paper lost its stick and had to be thrown away. Next time maybe we'll do a road with cars and trucks to drive on it. Or maybe a zoo with different animal silhouettes. Or boats on the ocean. Or anything else we can dream up and that he seems to be interested in.