In my kindergarten classroom, the students are learning about patterns. They have math centers each afternoon and there are different tables that ask them to create different patterns with blocks or by drawing them. Each morning when the classroom goes over their calendar, the different days of the week are represented by different pictures. The teacher creates a pattern in their calendar to reiterate for the students what a pattern can consist of. It seems to be hard for students to understand that there can be many forms of patterns.
Based upon prior knowledge of this student's mathematical skills, I anticipated that they would create a pattern only using two colors. As you can see above, the student only made a small chain of the pattern, so there is definitely room for improvement.
This student chose to work at the table with different colored squares. They were asked to create a pattern using up to four different colors. This student created a pattern by alternating yellow and red squares, only utilizing two different colors. This is the most basic pattern that the students seem to be grasping and understanding, so it is common for most of the students to construct a pattern similar to this. Students could also represent this pattern by drawing it on a piece of paper, using different colored crayons.
When working with this student next time, I would encourage the student to include more colors into their pattern. I would also encourage them to use a different pattern structure instead of the common A-B-A-B structure.
A good example...Try to think a little more specifically about a) what the "big idea" is for this task (e.g., "What are different patterns we can identify?", "How do we form our own patterns?"); b) what was the nature of this task itself (what was the task? what were students asked to do, specifically?); c) how you might advance the student's thinking by increasing the cognitive demand of the task.
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