What's the BIG Idea | Activity kit 6 | Patterns and Relationships Everywhere

MATH & SCIENCE LITERACY CONNECTIONS

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This kit is part of the What's The BIG Idea? series and contains:

- the Mother Goose Programs Patterns and Counting Collection

- instructional manual

- Pattern Fish by Trudy Harris

What do young children learn when they explore Patterns and Relationships Everywhere?

They identify, make and copy simple patterns
They predict what will come next in a pattern
They use shape and size words to describe patterns
They identify patterns and relationships everywhere

The goal of this What’s the BIG Idea? kit:

To provide a general, basic understanding of patterns and relationships while reading books, making observations and doing hands-on investigations.

$32.99

Download a PDF of a free sample activity

For young children, pattern recognition is the first step in understanding how our world is constructed and functions. Science and math depend upon patterns to comprehend the world of logic and direct the skills of problem solving and prediction. Relationships can be found within patterns and are a bit more difficult to recognize and understand. When a child discovers that five units of a pattern can be used to create one unit of a different pattern, that child has discovered a relationship.

Most of the world, both natural and human made, is constructed of units that repeat themselves into patterns. It is as if one unit of anything is not enough and it must be multiplied many times over before an object gets its structure. If you look closely at living things and human-made things, you will see many examples of single or core units making a simple repeating pattern (a-a-a-a-a-a and so on).

The core of patterns can be more complex when different units are added, such as a-b-a-b-a-b-a-b and so on or a-b-c-a-b-c-a-b-c-a-b-c and so on. You can see that these pattern cores are more than one kind of unit (a-b and a-b-c). There is no limit to pattern core complexity, so it is not always easy finding the repeating core of a pattern.
Non-visual patterns also have cores that repeat. When children listen to music, they can identify rhythm patterns and word patterns in lyrics. Poetry is full of metrical patterns and dance can contain motion patterns. When we arrange and sort, logic patterns guide the organization. Mathematics is often defined as the science of patterns.

You’ll find great visual and sound patterns investigations at:

http://pbskids.org/cyberchase/games/patterns/patterns.html

http://www.osv.org/kids/crafts2.htm

Shapes and Spaces Librarian Kit >

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0514746. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.