Button Activities
There is something wonderful about a bunch of buttons. I recently bought a bag of buttons for my son to explore. I used to keep a tub of buttons in my classroom to use to teach my students everything from math facts to forming the letters for the alphabet. Knowing how much they had enjoyed them I knew my son would too.I didn’t know that they would become his favorite thing to do. He has been playing with them for weeks. When my husband asks what he wants to play at night, he says that he wants to play with buttons. The bag of buttons has gone with us the the beach to play with in our hotel room. They go to doctor’s appointments. We even take to restaurants with us.
Button Play
What do we do with all the buttons?Exploring
The first thing he did was explore them. As with any new material I want to work with him using, I gave him time to play with them. He could do whatever he wanted to do them on the table.
I Spy Game
My son loves to play I Spy. We each took turns giving each other clues as to which button we spied. I Spy is a wonderful way to look at the attributes of button. You can use descriptive words about its size, color, shape, thickness, number of holes, etc…
Sorting By Size
When then focused on the attribute of size. I had my son sort the buttons into two groups. We had the large buttons and the tiny buttons. This helped him work on visual discrimination skills.
Color Matching
Then we sorted the buttons by color. The bag of button I purchased had only pink, red, green, off white and blue buttons in it. It made it easy for my son to sort when he only had those five colors to work on.
Patterning with Buttons
We have been working on patterns for awhile at my house. This time I asked my son to come up with an AABAABAAB pattern. If we were just starting to pattern I would have had him work on an ABABAB pattern. Yes, I could call it an AB pattern, but when I was in college a professor once said children needed to see patterns repeated three times to recognize that it was a pattern.
More Kids Activities
Aren’t these some great button activities? There are lots of fun ways to teach color matching and sorting. Take a look at these kids activities that teach similar early learning skills:- Learning Counting with Button Play
- Color Matching…with the Olympics
- {Button Play} Decorate a Pumpkin
I’m fascinated with all the buttons, but don’t have a collection of my own. Any ideas where they can be purchased in large quantities at a descent price?
I have gained a lot while reading your blog. I will definitely share this information with my friends.
Thanks for sharing.
I am so glad that I had the opportunity to review this blog because I came to know about new kid activity that not only interesting but also sharpen kids minds. Definitely will try this with my kid.I am in search of more fun activities for my son. Could you please suggest me some more unique kids activities?
So many people talk about how great buttons are, but I never seem to hear any specifics on using buttons. Now I know what to do! I think I’m going to go buy a bag of buttons this week and see how my kiddos like them.
We keep finding new things to do with them.
This totally inspired me to find my button stash and let Sammy play with them!
I can see Sammy spending hours exploring buttons.
Great idea! I don’t know about everyone else, but we have a button box filled with all kinds of buttons we find. I’m not sure why we save them all but now they could be turned into play. Much more useful than ever really needing one for its intended purpose.
My daughter is fascinated by buttons. And goodness knows I’ve collected enough through the years! We just may have to have fun with buttons this week!
Nice activity. Preschool students learn a lot through sorting and patterning activities. And that’s a lot of buttons!