My grandma was a children’s librarian, and when I was very small, I went to her storytimes. I don’t remember the books that she read to us (I was very young, in my defense), but I DO remember her leading the action rhyme Teddy Bear Teddy Bear and playing the game Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button at those storytimes. The latter game came to mind when I first read Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons.
I’m not sure that Button, Button would work with my storytime crowd, so I combined it with a game they do love to play, Little Mouse, Little Mouse, Are You in the (color) House.
After Pete loses his buttons, where do they go? Who knows, but I bet his friends help him look for them. Here are Pete’s friends–
And they have some of Pete’s buttons.
Buttons close up–
I ask the kids which color button they want to look for, and we ask “Green button, green button, who has the green button?” Then we guess which animal might have the green button, looking underneath each animal that the kids name.
Cow has the green button!
Once we find a button, I leave the animal off the board. This helps us (ok, ME!) remember which color buttons we’ve already found as we continue to play.
A few of the animals don’t have a button. This lets us reinforce the concept of zero, one of the numbers discussed in the book. Raccoon doesn’t have a button.
Keep looking until you find all the buttons! We look for red, green, blue and yellow buttons. I know that Pete doesn’t have a yellow button in the book, but I bet he has lost a groovy yellow button at some point.
I have two buttons for each color. This allows for more animals in the game, and also introduces another element to the game–memory. If we are looking for the green button and we find the red one instead, sometimes the kids remember where the red one is when are looking for it later. And if they don’t remember, that’s fine, too.
The animals are part of my ragtag bunch of colored and laminated paper animals that I keep handy, just for games like this. The buttons are office supply stickers with button holes colored on them with a Sharpie. Someday I will use slightly larger stickers, but these work fine. The board is sturdy posterboard coated in spray glue–the animals stick to the glue, making it possible to stick the button stickers right to the board under the animals. All of this could be done much prettier in flannel too, of course.