Sensory Play with Buttons

One of the stories in the book Frog and Toad are Friends is about Toad's missing button.  He looks everywhere for it and keeps finding buttons, but they are not his button (one is the wrong color, another the wrong shape, a third has the wrong number of holes, etc..).  This story inspired me to do a sensory play activity with buttons today for my twins...

I once bought a giant bag of miscellaneous buttons to use for sewing and crafting.  This was perfect to dump into a tray and let the girls explore.  I also gave them a sorting tray, but no instructions on what to do except to see if they could find some matching buttons for Toad.  Both girls immediately dug into the buttons, scooping them between their fingers, examining them in close detail, and sorting them by color.

They described the buttons - "this one is shiny", "look at how tiny this one is", etc..  I couldn't resist jumping in and playing too.  As I was playing, I compared buttons - "these two look alike, but one has two holes and the other has four."  Soon L and E started doing the same.  It's amazing how closely we had to examine the buttons to find matching pairs!

The girls also explored rolling the buttons that looked more like round beads, and pretending that the flat buttons with beveled edges were tiny plates and bowls.  The fun continued when I gave them each a measuring spoon and they practiced scooping and transferring the buttons between the containers:

Overall, they ended up playing with their tray of buttons for over two hours!

When I take this activity out again, I'm going to hide tiny objects in the buttons for them to find, and also take out some of our do-a-dot and playdough activity mats to see if they'll use them with the buttons.  Sometimes I run into a material that really gives me lots of creative play/learning ideas and now I've been thinking up with lots of fun button activity ideas all day...

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