Staircase pattern

Welcome back little mathematicians. What was your thinking? Ah yes, so I've thought about something similar to some of you, and I looked at these numbers and I thought to myself what do you already know? Mm-hmm. And when I see nine and one, I know something about those numbers.

Yes, I know, ohhh I should have drawn my 1 on a different post-it note. I know something about nine of something and one of something. Mm-hmm. That when I have nine of something and one of something, it always combines to make 10 of something. So that would be one 10. Aha and I could actually break off, fives head and say you go here and now we have 10 in our first column.

Mm-hmm, and then, yes, seven, aha and three, is also going to be 10 of something, because 7 of something and 3 of something always combines to make 10 of something. Yes, so we could take these blocks here, well thank you very much for volunteering your parts of your body's number blocks, and put them here and now look, uh huh, I have one 10, two tens. Look one 10, 9 and one, two tens, seven and three, and five more and we call two tens and five more 25. So there's 25 blocks all together. Wow!

Some of the mathematics here? Mathematicians use what they know to solve problems. I know 10 can be made of 9 and 1. I know 10 can be made of 7 and 3. I know 2 tens is called 20. I know two tens and five is called 25 and I know I can write that as 25. I also know how to count so we could also have counted all of the blocks to work out how many there are.

Mm-hmm, we also realized today that you can have growing and shrinking patterns. We saw a shrinking pattern when we looked at our staircase structures like this. It's a shrinking pattern because the number in each column decreases by two each time. Taking away two each time is our pattern core. Look, in our first column, there's 9, 2 less than 9 is 7, 2 less than 7 is 5, 2 less than 5 is 3, and 2 less than 3 is 1.

So it's over to you now mathematicians. Use objects to create two new growing patterns and two new shrinking patterns. Draw and describe them in your mathematics workbook. Have a lovely day!