Preschool activities to promote patterning skills

It’s Wednesday, and here at Preschool Ponderings, that means time to focus on the standards.  Every Wednesday I choose an Early Learning Standard and share a number of activities that can be aligned with that particular standard.  Remember, the Standards that I use every day, and am most comfortable with are Ohio’s Early Learning Development Standards – you can review them here, however I’ve found that even if your State’s standards differ, many of these activities can still be aligned similarly. I’ve rounded up some great ideas today!

Domain: Mathematics
Strand: Algebra
Topic: Patterning

There are a ton of activities that you can do with little ones to work on patterning skills.  The general rule of thumb is to start with simple patterns (i.e. abababab), once children understand that patterns repeat themselves, then they can begin to understand that a pattern can be anything that repeats, at this point you can introduce more complicated patterns (i.e. abcabc or abbabb).  Here are just a few ideas for working on patterning skills with your students;