Playing With Patterns
Patterns in literature are a dime a dozen, and I’m working with my first-grade friends on finding them. We have been really digging into patterns lately. After working through concept attainment, we moved into creating patterns in rhyme. Now, we are reading short stories and hunting for patterns. Today’s lesson was fun, and I couldn’t wait to share what some of my friends came up with!
The Lesson
It all started with a familiar tale–Goldilocks and the Three Bears. We read through the story, with the students choral reading along with me at strategic points so they could get a good feel for the repetitive pattern. They got more and more excited as we read and were anxious to share the patterns they found. I had them hold their patterns in their heads until the end. All of their hands immediately shot up as soon as the story was complete. Then came the fun part. I told them rather than just share out our patterns, we were going to build them instead, and then I placed a tub of unifix cubes in the center of the table.
“Build a pattern you found in the story,” I told them. They all looked at me with questioning eyes. “There’s no wrong answer here, friends! Be creative. Use the blocks to represent some pattern you saw.” After a moment, they all dug in. I had some ideas in my head about where they might go with this, and at first, some of their patterns looked like what I had envisioned. It became clear that they were way ahead of me when we started to share out about five minutes (and many patterns) later.
WOW! Work
What I expected to see was many patterns of three: simple A/B/C patterns, A/A/B patterns, or even A/BB/CCC patterns. And I did get some of those. What really shook it up for me was what was behind their thinking. These first-grade friends came up with some crazy (and awesome) ideas. Check out the pictures below to see.
Our setup for building–it’s amazing to me that they were all sitting close to one another, with every opportunity to see what others were building and yet they all came up with very different ideas.
This friend built upon the fact that each set comes back to the Little, Wee, Small Bear. Simple enough, but he made three separate strings of three to demonstrate that each thing happens three times (porridge, chair, bed; porridge chair, bed; porridge, chair, bed). The extra thought behind the three sets of three is our next topic for discussion!
Patterns from two friends here.
On the left, she talked about the fact that the Big Bear had a small problem (dark blue); the Middle Bear had a medium problem (green); and the Little Bear had the biggest problem (light blue). This student also made another one that was the same pattern with different colors and correlated it to how upset she felt like each bear would have been to encounter each problem (more cubes = more upset).
On the right, this student made a pattern to show that the two larger bears’ problems could be considered similar, but the little bear’s problem was different and caused a change in scene (looking for the next problem set).
This friend looked at the tone of each bear’s voice as they had patterns in order of speech–lighter colors = higher intonation. She demonstrated using a singing voice for us how the tone moved deeper with the deepening colors.
This friend had a different pattern that needed to stand upright. He started on the right side, and said the red represented the escalation in problems (no issues, Goldilocks messed with the porridge, then added the chairs to her mess, then got the beds involved and had made messes all over the house). The far left column represents her jumping out of the window–she left them with a mess, but at least she was gone and not causing more problems. I loved this growing pattern!
Are you as blown away as I was? One of my favorite parts of teaching is when the kids become teachers. This lesson was one for the books.
When is the last time you did a lesson and the kids went so far above and beyond? Can you think of other patterns in this story? We would love to hear from you! Want to use this lesson on patterns? Check out our previous post on patterns or check out one of our TPT units on patterns or fairy tales to get started!
By, Anna and Emily
