I saw this fun Button Stem activity while looking for some STEM activities for my kids and knew I had to give it a try!
First, we read Pete the Cat and his Four Groovy Buttons. I usually teach subtraction with this book but since I’m in TK this year, not sure when subtraction will be happening 🙂
I partnered the kiddos up and gave them buttons of all different sizes and a can of play-doh. I was going to let them do it independently but we really are working on what it looks like to take turns and work together in pairs.
I love all of the different ideas they had to come up with the tallest structure. One group just rolled up the buttons in the play-doh and tried to prop it up. They soon realized that wasn’t the best way to get their structure to stand up. There was a lot of trial and error…but no tears! Which I was bracing myself for since this was the first activity we did like this.
The yellow paper is just cardstock laminated that I use as play-doh mats so it makes clean up a little bit easier.
The other button book that was mentioned in the blog post where I got this idea was Corduroy but I’m a big Pete fan so we went with that text instead.
I would suggest trying to find buttons of different sizes!
Have fun 🙂
