Teach-Primary-Issue-19.1

The world is full of amazing patterns, and opening children’s eyes to them can be an exciting and hands-on way to develop mathematical reasoning and problem-solving skills. You can also use this opportunity to get out of the classroom and take your pupils outside to look at patterns in nature – on trees, shells, and flowers – or in their urban surroundings, such as tessellating bricks, tiles, and pavement slabs. Any real-life examples you can show themwill help to solidify the concept of a pattern as a sequence that repeats itself, whether that’s with colours, shapes, or numbers. 1 | CREATING PATTERNS First, decide what equipment to use to create your patterns. You can use found materials such as stones, feathers, leaves, shells, and conkers, or maths equipment including 2D and 3D shapes, cubes, beads, buttons, and counting and sorting resources. Next, invite the children to work with a partner and take turns creating a repeating pattern using the chosen resources for their partner to continue. Remind them of the rules of repetition you all used in the starter activity, and how this is a key element of creating patterns. Let pupils take photos of their patterns and show them to the class on the whiteboard. Can children describe what they see? What was repeated – the colour, shape, position or size of the objects? Can they define the rule of the pattern (what is being repeated, and when)? Introduce terms such as alternating , order , and sequence . Ask pupils to say what would come next in each pattern. To round out this section, play a game of ‘Whatever next?’. Challenge the children to draw the patterns they’ve just created onto thin strips of paper. They can then pass these around the class for their fellow pupils to draw what they think comes next in each repeated pattern. START HERE MAIN LESSON WHAT THEY’LL LEARN l To recognise repeated patterns around them l To create and continue repeated patterns using a variety of materials l To explore repeated patterns in art and maths l To recognise symmetry in snowflakes and other shapes Maths, science, art Begin by creating a repeating pattern with the children themselves. Sit in a circle and explain that they are going to make a pattern using different body shapes. Go around and number the pupils in groups from one to three. Ask them to stand up and invite all the number ones to hold up one arm, number twos to hold up both arms, and number threes to hold up two arms and one leg. Alternatively, number ones can stand up, twos sit down, and threes curl up in a ball. Repeat the exercise using different visual clues, such as holding up number cards, Numicon or maths link cubes. Can the children think of other ways to create a repeated pattern around the circle? Stripes and spots and swirls, oh my! Challenge children to discover mathematical patterns in the world and to create their own, with Judith Harries KS1 LESSON PLAN 74 | www.teachwire.net