I just love bright and colorful buttons and so whenever I happen to find a bag of them, I pick them up and save them. I finally found the perfect chance to share all the colorful buttons I had saved when I stumbled onto the book titled, “Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons” by Eric Titwin and James Dean…
“Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons” is such a fun book to read aloud with young children. It is basically a counting book with some simple subtracting along the way and it comes with a wonderful rhyme to chant or rap while looking at the bright and colorful illustrations…
You can go online to the Pete the Cat website and download the audio recording of the book. I burned the recording on a CD and added it to my listening center for the children to read the book on their own during center time. I will tell you that the rap sounded much cooler on the audio recording than my read-aloud version – but hey – I was trying to be cool like Pete the Cat!…
In addition to our listening center, we also set out a button collage center …
The children found glue, foam board squares, and buttons on the table to create with…
My students have become experts at using the glue bottles but to make the buttons really stick to that board, I encouraged the children to make big puddles of glue or their buttons would most likely fall off after they dry…
Once the children added their glue, then they added buttons on top of the glue and gently pressed down so the button would stick to the board. The glue will dry clear in a couple of days, so we didn’t worry about if the glue came through the button holes…
Some of the children chose to add lots of buttons on their boards and others preferred to add only a few. And some of the children chose to stack the buttons instead of just spreading them out on the board…
Once the children completed their button collages, then all that was left to do was to add their name onto the board…
Then the children put their button collages in the drying rack for the weekend. They should be dry when we get back to school next week…
For those of you who are wondering, I got some of my big, bright, and colorful buttons from the craft section at Walmart and some of them at Michaels…
In my next post, I will share with you a few other button activities we explored to extend our fun with “Pete the Cat and His Groovy Buttons…
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