What is a pattern?

Our class had gotten very good at labelling patterns and describing them using attributes. We had stopped talking about patterning because we assumed students understood patterns pretty well. Untill…

In the art centre, many students were sticking easter stickers onto papers. Students could choose from eggs, flowers and bunnies of different colours and sizes. O.P.H. came over and showed me two lines of stickers. He told me he had created a pattern and wanted to share with the class. O.P.H. didn’t have a pattern but this was a good learning opportunity to define what a pattern was.

Students agree that O.P.H.’s lines were not a pattern. “It doesn’t repeat” said G.P. “The shapes and colours don’t repeat” said C.C.. However, students couldn’t really define what a pattern was besides “it repeats”. By this logic, O.P.H.’s lines are a pattern because the shapes do repeat.

Following the first group lesson, I placed three lines of egg, flower and bunny shapes on the smartboard. Two of the lines were patterns and one was not.

Students were able to describe the patterns and extended the patterns. In order to better define “the repeating” educators introduced the term pattern core. We discussed how many objects were in the pattern core (we circled them above).  We concluded that patterns are patterns because they have a pattern core that repeats.