The Button Box

Don't you love buttons? I recently found this box of buttons for $5 at a garage sale--it was even all sorted and separated in little baggies. I thought we'd explore a bit as we read The Button Box (again) and we started opening a few buttons and putting them in a divided, recycled cookie tray; however, children had other ideas and I'm pretty open to following their lead.

Soon all these little baggies of carefully sorted buttons were in one big pile. And then we started sorting again! We found buttons that had four holes or two holes or just a shank.

The Button Box shows a boy opening his grandmother's button box and sorting through the treasures. It also shows how buttons could come from shells, wood, deer antlers, and more. He makes a string and button toy, counts his "gold" as he puts them back, and then ends with a little history on buttons. I also played with my grandmother's button box. Do people still have button boxes? I hope so! Our button box actually had antler/bone buttons, too. So neat to see the connections from the book! 

We found some that the boys looked like eyes and separated out the shiny ones! 

Some ideas to extend the buttons from the book: 

Sort, count, create pictures from buttons, puppet eyes, etc. 

Sort by:

-Flowers

-sparkly

-cloth

-metal

-leather

-shoes

-family connections

-shiny

-rainbows

-wooden

-seashells, sand, wood, antlers

Ask, “Are they alike?”

As children get older you might chart types of buttons even, bringing in a math component if they are interested. I was surprised even my 8 year old and almost 11 year old were enjoying these as well. My youngest (almost 5) spent over an hour with these today. I'll leave them out this week for them to peruse as they'd like!

Interested in Loose Parts and Books? Find my list here! 

Buy the book "The Button Box" here! (aff link)

Here is a video of the book. Here are some other extension activities as well. 

How do you all use buttons?