Learning a bunch with buttons.

Enolah is at such a fun age right now, well most of the time she's fun and often times she's quite a challenge. Any who her little brain is a sponge. I have noticed several people who homeschool start activities around this age (2 and a half). We're not planning to homeschool but I still wanted to do a couple learning activities with her each week. This morning I was feeling inspired and googled "homeschool activities for toddlers" to get an idea of what you could do at this age and noticed a lot of age appropriate activities included colors, shapes, sorting or a mixture of the three. Usually with premade purchased kits. Well I don't have any of these kits but again I was feeling inspired so I rummaged through my craft room and the kitchen and devised two fun activities with buttons!

What you'll need:

- a bag or several different colored buttons
- an old egg carton
- a camera
- a color printer.

Sorting by colors- I took an egg crate and put one of each color button in a space. Then I gave her a bowl full of all the buttons and told her to put the yellow with yellow, green with green and so on. You get it.

Intense concentration.

She's got the idea and doing great!

Shape stencils: Next I took the buttons and arranged them into different shapes on a white piece of paper. I took a picture of each shape, uploaded them to my computer and printed them out. Again I gave her the of buttons and said to make the same shape. An orange triangle, blue square, etc. 

Something to note, when you go to print them out print a test one to check for scale. I made the blue square too big and she said the buttons "didn't fit" so she found a color button that did and ended up making a yellow square.

Again with the concentration. 

There you have it. A fun learning activity for your toddler. You probably have these items laying around too! I plan on making this next, after a trip to the craft store unless I can find some spare wood laying around in the garage.