Repeating and Growing Patterns
Lessons in this chapter
About Repeating and Growing Patterns
Pattern Power carries the pattern thread into 2nd grade, where the step is for kids to state the rule rather than simply continue the sequence.
Identify and Extend a Repeating Pattern uses longer and less obvious units than earlier grades. Extending a pattern is one skill; saying what repeats is another, and the second is the one the lesson is after because it is what makes a long extension possible without drawing every step.
Identify Growing and Shrinking Pattern asks for the step size. A sequence going 4, 7, 10, 13 grows by three each time, and naming that three lets a child jump ahead rather than add their way along.
A rule like “add three each time” is an algebraic statement written in words. Kids who have been describing sequences this way since kindergarten find the leap to letters much smaller when expressions arrive in 6th grade.
Identify and Extend a Repeating Pattern and Identify Growing and Shrinking Pattern are the chapter's two lessons, each a worksheet worked in the page and scored as you go. Growing patterns carry the new idea: the step itself changes, which is the first hint of a rule rather than a repeat. Both are free.
Frequently asked questions
Spotting and extending a repeating pattern, and then recognizing growing and shrinking patterns, where each step changes by a fixed amount. Patterns are not a named Common Core topic at 2nd grade; generating and analyzing them is a 4th grade standard under Operations and Algebraic Thinking. The reasoning here supports 2.OA and the skip counting done earlier in the year.
Identifying and extending repeating patterns, and identifying growing and shrinking patterns including the size of each step.
The emphasis moves from continuing a pattern to stating its rule. A child who can say “it goes up by three” can jump ahead; one who can only extend has to work step by step.
One where each step is smaller than the last by a fixed amount, like 20, 17, 14, 11. It is the mirror of a growing pattern and it practices subtraction.
Because a rule like “add three each time” is an algebraic statement in words. Replacing the words with symbols is all that later grades change.
Start a sequence, stop, and ask for the rule rather than the next term. Asking for a term much further along forces them to use the rule instead of counting.