Growing Patterns
Age group
- Early Years (Age 3 to 6)
Curriculum Goal
Kindergarten: Demonstrating Literacy and Mathematics Behaviour
Recognize, explore, describe, and compare patterns, and extend, translate, and create them, using the core of a pattern and predicting what comes next (#18).
Related Links
Context
Students and teacher will be sitting on the carpet in a circle. Students should have previous experience with patterns and making patterns.
Materials
- Paper “magical snakes” (Appendix A)
- Small beads or small manipulatives to use as “magical pellets”
Lesson
- Bring out one snake and say that this snake can play basketball if it has two magical pellets.
- Then bring out a snake twice the size. Ask How many pellets will this snake need to play basketball?
- Present a smaller snake and ask the same question as above.
- Listen to children’s theories about how many pellets the snakes need.
- Reinforce that they are learning about patterns and that there will be some pattern to how many pellets the snakes will need.
- Repeat the steps above using different pattern combinations.
- Patterns can include doubling, adding by three, etc.
- If children become proficient at spotting patterns, children can make up their own patterns and share it with their classmates.
Look Fors
- Are they able to express their reasoning?
- Are children able to identify the pattern and calculate at the next and previous iteration?