Curriculum
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).
Context
- Students and teacher sitting on the carpet in a circle.
Materials
- Roughly 20 Unifix cubes per student
Lesson
- Place unifix cubes in the middle of the circle.
- Instruct students to gather approximately 10 cubes of two different colours.
- Introduce how to identify and build patterns based on colour by providing examples (e.g. AAB).
- Inform students that this segment of the pattern is called the “building block”.
- Demonstrate that when multiple ”building blocks” (AAB) are combined a pattern is formed through repetition (AABAABAAB).
- Once basic patterning concepts are grasped instruct students to create a unique “building block” of their own.
- Once all students have had the opportunity to construct a pattern, go around the circle and ask each student to name and describe the pattern they have created.
Look Fors
- Can children identify the ”building block”?
- How quickly and easily do children build accurate patterns?
Extension
- This activity can be done using two, three, four, or more different coloured unifix cubes depending on the level of the children.
