McCormick Student Work

When I was teaching math this week, students were learning about patterns. Student homework required students to wear patterned clothing to school the next day. When I asked students about the patterns they were wearing, most were able to say the color pattern on their shirts and socks. One child raised her hand to tell me a pattern. She said, "pink, white, yellow" referring to the colors she saw on her shoes. I asked her if it was a pattern and she said yes. I reviewed what a pattern was after she said this.

At this point, the student does not understand the repetition part of a pattern. She simply thinks that stating colors is a pattern. She may think this because many other students said color patterns, such as red, blue, red, blue, etc. The gap in her understanding is that she is not actually stating patterns. One way to advance her thinking would be to show her multiple types of patterns visually so that she can start to see why we call it a pattern. Although patterns were introduced to her, she could benefit from a stronger introduction with visual, oral, and musical patterns. Another way to advance her thinking would be to show her multiple types of patterns including AB, ABC, and AAB patterns. This would show her that not all patterns take the same form and that not all patterns are color patterns. A question that I might ask her is how she would make the color of her shoes into a pattern. I would ask her to draw the pattern and verbally say the pattern so that I could hear her thinking. A future math task that would be beneficial to her would be to describe multiple types of patterns that are shown to her. This would help her to recognize when something is a pattern and when it is not a pattern.