[Solutions are shown after the activities]
TASK 1: What do you see?
TASK 2: Make your own patterns
Using dabbers on inch-grid chart paper or link cubes allows students to represent their patterns quickly.
Create opportunities for students to perform their patterns (such as sing, dance or hop, and xylophones).
Ask students to identify the pattern core in each of their repeating patterns (such as blue-yellow-yellow in the first pattern below).
TASK 3: Complete the patterns
TASK 4: Patterns on a grid
EXTENSION
Model and then ask students to investigate the simulation at https://imaginethis.ca/mathncode/sims-repeating-patt.html
SOLUTIONS
TASK 1
What students might see:
1. Repeating patterns
Students may notice the yellow-yellow-green and blue-pink-yellow-yellow repeating patterns on the steps behind the dancers and in the rectangular arrangements being unearthed in front of the dancers.
You may provide inch-grid chart paper and dabbers, or multi-colour link cubes, so students may reproduce these patterns.
Students may also notice that repeating patterns in rectangular arrangements reveal vertical and diagonal colour patterns. We will discuss these patterns at greater length in Task #4.
2. Children performing
Students may notice children dancing on colour tiles.
They may also notice children playing a flute and a stringed instrument.
And they may notice that the 4 pipes of the flute and the 4 strings of the stringed instrument match the colours of the 4 tiles the children are dancing on.
You may provide interlocking colour mats (safely taped on the floor so they do not slide) and xylophones with similarly coloured bars, so children play notes and dance or hop to perform the repeating patterns.
Students may also sing the patterns as they dance or hop: yellow-yellow-green, yellow-yellow-green, yellow-yellow-green.
TASK 3
TASK 4
Ask students to develop rules to predict when the pattern is:
- vertical (Grid 2) [pattern core fits evenly in each row]
- diagonal or staircase-like,
- descending left to right (Grid 1) [pattern core is less than the width of the grid]
- descending right to left (Grid 3) [pattern core is more than the width of the grid].
NEXT
Coding puzzles … https://learnx.ca/mt/repeating-coding