Buttons from the Rag Bag! Button Jar Math Activities

When I was a little girl my mother kept a Rag Bag up in the attic. One of my favorite things to do was to go up into the attic and rummage through the Rag Bag. There were discarded clothing that we had outgrown, that were ripped or had fallen apart to such an extent that they were not longer useful as clothing but there were perfect for taking apart to make something new. 

One of the best parts about the Rag Bag, however, were the buttons. Mom would allow us to go through the old clothes looking for buttons. She taught us how to carefully cut off the threads so as not to cut the cloth and then we would have a new button to add to our button collection. 

We kept our button collection in an old Mason Jar. It took us years to fill it but oh, what fun we had adding buttons, playing with the buttons and learning math with those buttons!

Once you have a few buttons you can start looking for similarities and differences. Sorting is one of the first skills necessary to understanding mathematics and an activity that even very young children enjoy.

Take a handful of buttons and look at them carefully. Notice the shapes of the buttons. Are they all round or do you have some square buttons? Are any of the buttons half spheres? Sorting by shape is beginning geometry. 

You might like to sort your buttons by color. This is a great opportunity to introduce your children to graphing. Make a graph with boxes big enough for one button per box. Label the graph with colors across the bottom and numbers up the side. Show your children how to place the buttons according to the colors starting at the bottom. 

How many red buttons do you have? How many blue buttons? How many more red buttons than blue buttons? These are some of the many questions that can be easily seen once you have created your graph. How many more yellow buttons would you need to have the same number as the black buttons?

Some buttons are larger than others. Buttons found on coats are often the largest. Some buttons are very small. You can find small buttons on baby clothes and on the collars of men's shirts. When sorting buttons it can be fun to use a template.

Templates like the one above make beautiful designs. Young children love to choose the buttons to place on the template as they sort the smaller verses larger buttons. Older children like to create their own designs or make templates for their younger siblings.

Sometimes it can be fun to glue the buttons onto the designs as a piece of artwork. How else could you use these mathematical designs? 

Now let's look at the holes in the buttons. Some buttons have two holes and others have four. Sort the your buttons by the number of holes and then line them up in an orderly fashion. For younger children be sure to use very few buttons for this activity. Older children benefit from grouping the buttons into rows of tens as they will quickly see how they can count the number of holes by multiplying by ten.

Put a finger on each button as you skip count by the number of holes in each button. 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 button holes. Once your child can skip count by two's it is time to go on to skip counting by 4's. 

Mix up a batch of bear colored play dough and set out buttons with either two or four holes in each. Children make bears by rolling out the dough and cutting it with a bear shaped cookie cutter. Challenge your children to make multiplication problems with the bears and buttons.

Make one bear with one button. 1 X 2 = 2 (One button with two holes in it equals two holes all together.)

Make a second bear with two buttons. 2 X 2 = 4 (Two buttons with two holes each has 4 holes all together.)

Continue until you have made ten or twelve bears.

Use index cards to write the number sentences below each bear.

Note: The buttons clean up easily if soaked in warm soapy water.

Buttons are also ideal for learning place value. Take a jar of buttons and estimate the number of buttons in the jar. Then using string and a needle, string as many groups of ten as possible. Then group  each string of buttons into a hundred, forming a necklace.

When you have used up all of the buttons you will know the number of hundreds, tens and ones. The hundreds will be necklaces. The tens will be strings of buttons and the left overs will be the ones.

How many buttons did you count?