I first learned about the "sticky mosaics" range when I read an excellent review, which highly recommended them, on this very site. They are an art and craft item and come in various incarnations, the basic premise is that you make mosaics on a piece of card using small stickers. We had tried a few smaller sets after reading the recommendation on dooyoo, but recently I bought this particular set as I thought, correctly as it happened, that it would be much enjoyed.

The Sticky Mosaics "fairies" set costs around £15 - I bought mine from Toysrus - and consists of a box containing 4 card printed fairy pictures to be completed with the stickers included in the set, of which there is a variety of shiny, sparkly and even jewel stickers in a range of suitably girlie colours. Each picture is a bit larger than an A4 piece of paper and has a printed coloured background - you can see a picture on the amazon link above, they are all attractive and appealing to children. There are no instructions in the set as such, other than a printed sheet which tells you which colour sticker goes with which numbers - all the little squares which need filling with stickers have a printed number in them so, eg, all number 1's need filling with shiny silver, there are 12 different sticker types in all. This is far simpler than it sounds and all I can say is that for both my children who, generally, like quite different things, the sticky mosaic set has instant appeal and is really something they enjoy and will spend a long time doing.

What's great is that this activity involves little - to no - mess, sometimes the little backing bit to the tile sticker can become detached and the pieces end up on the floor, but overall the activity is impressively simple and, apparently, compelling at the same time, when my kids got this set they both settled down for two straight hours of making a mosaic - and so proud was the 4 year old with the results that she insisted on taking her fairy with her to bed so you could look at it all night!

Once stuck (the stickers are not too small and fiddly for little hands but not so big that they fill up the page over quickly), the stickers do in my experience stay put, though they can also be repositioned if errors are made. The whole card is not full of mosaic squares - as you can see from the amazon picture - but there's certainly enough sticking in this set to keep them busy for a good while, and hundreds of stickers. We found that there were plenty of stickers to complete the pictures, now proudly displayed, by the way the amazon product page mentions a hanger for this item which it doesn't actually contain. One small criticism I do have of this set is that although each fairy have little 3-d jewels for eyes there are also some flower shaped jewels but these are ALL on one picture, not so much of a problem if you are giving the set to one child but more problematic if you are sharing!

Though this activity doesn't involve any creativity at all - you pretty well need to follow the pattern, this doesn't seem to worry my children - they did use some of the left over tiles to make some impressive sparkly hearts though. I suppose doing this does involve number recognition of sorts, so though my 4 year old can manage this with no help you may find a younger child may need help, I wouldn't have thought a child of much under 3 would have the patience to do this activity (and indeed the smaller stickers may be a choking hazard). I think Orb Factory make sets with bigger stickers and less to complete for the younger age range, and they do a whole range including less girlie things too, like dinosaurs and trucks.

For my girls this set is absolutely ideal and they are saving up for another one, they've had so much fun from making these that I don't mind at all - it's fun, the results are good - and did I mention it kept them quiet and busy for hours? For all these reasons highly recommended!