It's no secret that buttons are handy things; the help keep your jeans up for a start. They're also a rather sneaky way of improving hand-eye co-ordination with youngsters. Give them a bag of plastic buttons and some elastic and tell them to make themselves a necklace."Oh yes please," is the answer you'll get. Then try not to laugh as you watch them work hard, really hard, to make the necklace.
To make a button necklace all you need is buttons and a piece of elastic, pre-cut so that it is long enough to make a loop that will slip on and off over their head.
When it comes to buttons, look for large craft ones, not 'real' ones which are often designed to be discrete and are therefore smaller and more fiddly. I ended up with two bags, one with giant buttons, and another with coin-sized buttons, but both were bright and bold and an assortment of shapes and sizes. I enjoyed watching the girls debate the fairest ways to divide the buttons between them. They tried color sorting, shape shifting, and in the end they settled on first in first served and then inevitably both wanted the exact same yellow star and nothing else would do! They experimented with different ways of threading too. Going through one whole per button was definitely fastest, but they found that going through two holes, made the buttons turn sideways and this made a more interesting necklace end-effect.
I took a photo of Little Lotti's 'sad facce' but couldn't bring myself to include it on the blog... mainly because I felt bad for letting her get sad in the first place.... you see I didn't tell them to knot the elastic string, or use a button to tie it off. It only took Mimi about three buttons to realize they were falling off the end and ask for help. Little Lotti threaded a lot of buttons in her lap while I was out of the room, and when I came back in she held them up proudly to show me - and they all slipped straight off the other end - boo hoo.
I got close to 30 minutes peace out of this activity, maybe more... not bad really. They wore there creations to dinner that night to show Daddy, and then agreed happily enough to un-thread them the next day and have another go. Mimi's keen to try a rainbow-pattern next time, Lotti's just wants to watch TV! Turns out letting her learn the hard way may have scarred her for life... hmmm...
Knot heartaches aside, this would be a fun party-craft activity for youngsters to do, provided they're old enough not to put the buttons in their mouth. The black elastic looks great with the bright coloured buttons, and I can totally imagine the side-by-side button look for a girly superhero costume. So go on - button up!
