Patterns with Shapes and Objects
Lessons in this chapter
About Patterns with Shapes and Objects
Patterns Everywhere asks kids to find the rule behind a sequence, which is the single most transferable thing in the kindergarten math curriculum.
Identify Repeating Patterns starts with the kind kids see on clothes and tiles: red, blue, red, blue, and on. The skill being built is not spotting that something repeats, which most kids do instantly, but naming the unit that repeats and using it to say what comes next.
Identify Increasing and Decreasing Pattern moves to sequences that grow or shrink: one dot, two dots, three dots, or a row of blocks getting shorter. Here the rule is about change rather than repetition, so a child has to work out how much is being added or taken away each time.
Both lessons are doing algebra early. Finding the rule that generates a sequence is exactly what later grades ask for when they write a term-to-term rule or an expression, and kids who have done it with shapes find it far less strange when it arrives with letters.
Identify Repeating Patterns and Identify Increasing and Decreasing Pattern each open as a worksheet in the page. The questions give a sequence and ask what comes next, which is a child's first version of finding a rule and using it. Both are free to practice online and scored as you go.
Frequently asked questions
Two lessons. Identify Repeating Patterns covers sequences that cycle, like red, blue, red, blue, and Identify Increasing and Decreasing Pattern covers the ones that grow or shrink by a step. Patterns are not one of the kindergarten Common Core domains; the standards do not ask for pattern rules explicitly until fourth grade, under Operations and Algebraic Thinking. It is here because finding the rule behind a sequence is the move the rest of the curriculum keeps asking for.
Repeating patterns, where a unit comes round again, and increasing or decreasing patterns, where each step grows or shrinks by the same amount.
Because finding the rule behind a sequence is what algebra does. A child saying “it goes up by two every time” is describing a rule, which is the same move as writing an expression, several years early.
A repeating pattern comes back to where it started, like red, blue, red, blue. An increasing pattern keeps growing, like one block, two blocks, three blocks. Decreasing patterns shrink the same way.
Continuing it is the first half and it is real progress. Asking what repeats, or how much it grows by, is what pushes it from noticing to describing, and that is the part later math uses.
Build them with whatever is on the table: cutlery, buttons, socks. Start one, stop, and ask what comes next. Then swap, and let them build one for you to continue.