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Deepening understanding...
Deepening understanding...
Much like "Shapes In Our World" students take pictures (either at home and/or at school) that are collected into a data set that is used to investigate patterns and other visual spatial concepts. Take 5-10 minutes once a week and explore what your students see over the course of the school year!
Posing a simple question such as, "What patterns do you see?" allows for multiple entry points, discussion, and further investigations when something is unknown. This activity allows for authentic math talk and investigation where the teacher can insert the language/vocabulary students may not yet have acquired.
This is only one way to explore patterns in the world - consider using video clip entries as well that may include numerical, auditory, visual, movement or temporal patterns.
Be prepared for students to identify and play with patterns that might go beyond what you assess in the curriculum. That is okay! Providing students with the language with which to describe what they are seeing, building and creating is laying foundational and important levels of understanding. In reality, so many of the patterns that are found in the world around us are not simple repeating patterns - students readily recognize these but may not have the language to describe them.
"Children love to find patterns in the world around them. Patterns help children understand change and that things happen over time. Patterns are things that repeat in a logical way, like vertical stripes on a sweater. They can be numbers, images or shapes...Patterns help children make predictions because they begin to understand what comes next. They also help children learn how to make logical connections and use reasoning skills. Patterns can be found everywhere in our daily lives and should be pointed out to small children...Do not underestimate what a child is capable of learning in all academic areas including math." Michigan State University
BIG IDEAS for Pattern:
Patterns are sequences governed by a rule; they exist in both the world and in mathematics.
Identifying the rule of a pattern brings predictability and allows us to make generalizations.
The same pattern structure can be found in many different forms.
(Erikson Institute, Big Ideas of Early Mathematics, pg 84)
"From the earliest age, young children innately look for patterns in their world...the human brain is predisposed to pattern, to find similarities that bind seemingly unrelated information together in a whole. Without recognition of pattern, children would experience all events as discrete, separate and unrelated. Children crave regularity because it allows them to predict what comes next and make sense of their world...virtually all mathematics is based on pattern and structure." (Erikson Institute, Big Ideas of Early Mathematics, pg 83-84)
Sample of conversation snippets and pictures students submitted in a Grade 1 class (Winter/Spring):
"The colors repeat. The pieces come out from the middle." (radial pattern)
"The keys repeat in a pattern of color. They also go down up down up down up." (repeating color or position pattern)
"The colors repeat but it's also a shrinking pattern because it's getting smaller."
"The shape of the bins keeps repeating. It's also a growing pattern because there are 2 then 4 then 6 bins."
"The lines zig zag over and over." (repeating line pattern)
"The shapes keep repeating and fit together." (tessellation pattern)
"There is a pattern in the lines on the chair. There's also a color pattern: brown, black, brown black, white, brown, white, blue, red, black..." (repeating color pattern that is complex, repeating shape pattern with the lines)
"The same picture keeps repeating. The little flowers go around the one in the middle." (mandala pattern)
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