Kindergarten

Tips for Helping at Home

•

Look for patterns in your environment.

Where do you see pat-

terns? How are patterns

made? Can you find a pat-

tern in music or in a story

you read or tell?

•

Look at the clothing in

your child’s closet. Which

items have patterns and

which do not? You child

may want to sort his or her

clothes into two groups:

those with patterns and

those without.

•

Make patterns together. Lots of household

items are fun to make patterns with: buttons,

caps and bottle tops, coins, and keys are just

a few. You can also take turns and add on to

each other’s patterns.

•

Try physical pattern rou-

tines with motions, such as

clapping your hands and

tapping your knees in a

repetitive pattern. Start the

pattern and see if your

child can predict what will come next. Then

reverse the game, with your child making a

pattern for you to extend.

Website

http://cms.everett.k12.wa.us/math/Kinder

Mathematical Emphasis

Investigation 1— Exploring Patterns

•

Observing and describing attributes

•

Recognizing and describing a pattern

•

Creating and extending patterns

•

Predicting what comes next in a pattern

Investigation 2—What Comes Next?

•

Recognizing a pattern

•

Constructing and extending a pattern

•

Reading a pattern

•

Predicting what comes next in a pattern

•

Identifying the unit of a pattern

Investigation 3—Hopscotch Paths

•

Constructing and extending a pattern

•

Interpreting a pattern using physical movements

•

Recording a pattern

•

Representing a physical pattern using materials

•

Predicting what comes next in a pattern

•

Identifying a unit of a pattern

Investigation 4—Pattern Borders

•

Making a linear pattern in a rectangular frame

•

Making and comparing patterns that use the same

two variables (of color)

•

Copying, building, and extending patterns that

grow or shrink in some regular and predictable

way

•

Determining a rule for how a pattern grows or

shrinks

•

Recording patterns

Exploring Pattern

---

Than Once

Games are used throughout the

Investigations

curriculum

as a vehicle for engaging students in important mathe-

matical ideas.

The more students play the games the more opportunities

they have to practice important skills and to think and rea-

son mathematically. The first time or two that students

play, they focus on learning the rules. Once they have

mastered the rules, their interest turns to the mathematical

content.

For example, when students play Compare, they practice

counting and comparing quantities. Over time, they be-

come familiar with addition combinations through frequent

experience, rather than by rote memorization.

For many students, repeated experiences lead naturally to

developing more efficient strategies for combining num-

bers, to reasoning about numbers and number combina-

tions, and to explore relationships among number combi-

nations.

Eston, Rebecca. Investigations in Number, Data, and

Space: Pattern Trains and Hopscotch Paths. Dale

Seymour Publications, 1998.

Vocabulary

Pattern - predictable elements that alternate,

repeat, increase or decrease in a regular way.

a-b pattern -

a-b-b pattern -

a-b-b-a pattern -

Unit - the

element

that repeats in a pattern

Staircase pattern

Border pattern

Glossary

http://www.amathsdictionaryforkids.com/

Game

What Comes Next?

Gather items such as

blocks, silverware, keys,

buttons, etc.

One player makes a

pattern and hides the

last six elements of it.

The other player then

builds the same pattern,

copying as much as is

showing, and predicts

what’s hidden.