Learning patterns is important. It doesn’t look useful or significant but when you realize that patterns exists everywhere you’d know how important it is. Pattern is not just for worksheets or for exercises. It’s preparing our children for the real world.
Patterns occur a lot in nature. Animal spots and stripes have patterns. Flowers and shells follow a certain pattern. Music and dance is a series of patterns. A more closer example of a pattern is time. The hours of a day follows a 24 hour pattern. The days of the week and the months of a year follows a pattern.
In math, doing addition, subtraction, multiplication and division is actually learning a pattern. Without a pattern, we would multiplying 9 by 9 by counting each object one by one until we reach the final number. But since we know the pattern, we can blurt out that 9×9 is 81.
The significance of a patterns is how it teaches us to predict outcomes. And this happens through analysis. Prediction and analysis are every important math skills for children to learn. They can use these skills in any field or career.
The worksheets and printables below helps build a foundation in learning patterns. It starts with the simple ABAB pattern and uses Unifix Cubes to predict the next colors.
If you don’t have the Unifix Cubes, you can simply printout the blank pattern train sheet and color the first four boxes and let your child complete the pattern in the remaining boxes. Or you can follow this idea on pattern trains from GradeOnederful.com
I will add more pattern sheets as we progress to more advanced patterns.
Daddy Tips:
1. Gab loves trains, so I tell Gab that we are building a pattern train. He calls it a monorail pattern.You can call it other things that interests your child like it’s a pattern snake or a pattern tower, etc.
2. To take it further, ask your child to create and build his own pattern. Allow the child to explain what the pattern is.
3. You can start building your own pattern train and ask your child to copy or follow your pattern.
Click the images to view/download the worksheets or printables
BLANK PATTERN
ABAB PATTERNS
ABCABC PATTERNS (Coming soon)
