Four Seasons Button Trees

On Thursday, I showed you our fall button tree.  Well, Becca loved that activity so much, that I decided to take it a step further, and do a little mini-lesson on the four seasons.  She’s well aware of them, and points out the different seasons – especially when we watch Peep and the Big Wide World on Netflix Kids.  (If you haven’t watched these science videos with your kiddos, they are fabulous for age 2 all the way up through ELL grade 1!)  But, I also found this little music video on YouTube that is cute and puts them all together nicely.  Becca was even singing it later in the day.

Then we sat down and looked at our trees.  I had the fall tree there, but also three other blank trees.  I had already purchased/gathered buttons for the other seasons, and she was most eager to do winter.  She loved the snowflake buttons we’d gotten at Michaels, and was super excited about putting them on.  Then when we did the spring tree, she got tired of placing individual buttons where she wanted them, and started grabbing whole handfuls and laying them over the branches – which I glued where she placed.  She was pretty much done by the time we got to the summer tree, but she put on the bigger buttons before getting down to go play.  I added the rest of the green buttons, and I’m really pleased with how they all turned out.

My ultimate plan with these is to get a canvas from Hobby Lobby or Michaels to attach them to, and display them as art in our home.  You could easily do the same, or plan to matt and frame them – you’d just have to use flatter buttons.  Our snowflakes are very 3D because they had loops on the back instead of button holes.

You could also maintain your child’s interest longer by only doing one tree in a day.  I was excited about seeing them finished, so I did Spring, Summer, and Winter all in one day.  You could easily make it a week-long activity by showing the music video, watching some Peep episodes, and checking out library books about each of the seasons.  Especially if you are introducing this topic for the first time.  Becca is already familiar with the concept of the seasons – it was more about creating the art than anything else for us.