Learning with Buttons

This morning my 4 year old son found my jar of buttons in my craft room. His interest made for some great learning opportunities.

I got out a rectangular container, some different colored pipe cleaners and a spoon. My son dumped all of the buttons into the container and moved them all around.

Once I had given him a chance to explore, I gave him a pipe cleaner and asked him to tell me what color it was. Then I asked him to put three red buttons on his red pipe cleaner.

Not only was this great for color matching, but it was also great fine motor skills practice.

My son matched buttons to pipe cleaners until he had put 3 matching buttons on each one. I wasn’t sure the activity would hold his interest, but he was very focused on his work.

Before we put the buttons away I picked out three buttons of differing sizes. I asked my son to put them into the correct size order from biggest to smallest and then from smallest to biggest.

We also tried to find buttons of various shapes and found that in addition to circles there were also a few square and oval buttons.

To put the buttons away, I gave my son a spoon and asked him to use it to put the buttons back into the jar. He did this transferring activity for quite a while until he did something which reminded me a great deal of what his father would do if he were asked to do this activity.

He turned the container on its side and dumped the rest of the buttons into the jar. 🙂

Buttons are a great manipulative for preschoolers. In less than 1/2 hour my son and I learned about shapes, colors, sizes, and practiced his fine motor skills.

If you are in need of buttons you have a few options. I purchased a big bag of assorted buttons several years ago at Walmart. Yard sales and thrift stores are also good places to find buttons inexpensively. You can also order some cool buttons from Amazon.

Have you used buttons as a learning tool with your preschooler?

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