Patterns & Position Words
Lessons in this chapter
About Patterns & Position Words
Patterns and Places puts two threads from kindergarten together: finding the rule behind a sequence, and describing where things are.
Identify Repeating Pattern revisits the pattern unit, now with longer and less obvious units than kindergarten used. A pattern of three or four elements is harder than two, because a child has to hold more before the repeat confirms it.
Identify Growing and Decreasing Pattern asks for the size of each step, not just the direction. Saying a sequence grows is observation; saying it grows by three each time is a rule, and that rule is what later becomes an expression.
Finding Your Way takes the position words from kindergarten and applies them to routes: left, right, forwards, past, between. Following and giving directions is the start of spatial reasoning on a grid, which is where coordinate geometry eventually picks up.
Three lessons, three worksheets, worked in the page. Identify Repeating Pattern and Identify Growing and Decreasing Pattern ask for the rule behind a sequence, and Finding Your Way turns position words into directions along a route. All three are free and marked as you go.
Frequently asked questions
Three lessons. Identify Repeating Pattern covers sequences that cycle, Identify Growing and Decreasing Pattern covers the ones that change by a fixed step, and Finding Your Way uses left, right, forwards, past and between to describe a route. Neither patterns nor position words is a first grade Common Core topic: position language sits in the kindergarten Geometry domain (K.G), and pattern rules appear in fourth grade Operations and Algebraic Thinking.
The units are longer and the growing patterns now need a step size. Kindergarten asked whether a sequence grows. This chapter asks by how much.
One where each step is bigger than the last by a fixed amount, like 2, 5, 8, 11. A decreasing pattern shrinks the same way.
Because it is the rule. “It goes up by three” lets a child jump to any later term instead of extending one step at a time, and it is the same move as writing an expression in later grades.
Describing and following a route using position and direction words: left, right, forwards, past, between. It is the practical use of the kindergarten position vocabulary.
Describing a position by directions is the informal version of describing it by coordinates. 5th grade's Coordinate Geometry formalises what starts here.