Manipulaitves make patterning easier for kindergarten students to visualize. Provide children with any number of objects -- small candies, feathers, toys, crayons or foam shapes, for example -- and have them use the objects to create different patterns. Offer them a guideline to base their patterns on by printing out letter patterns on a sheet of paper: ABAB, ABCABC and ABBABB, for instance. Children select an object to represent a letter in a given pattern -- a red crayon for A and a blue crayon for B -- and re-create the pattern. In the ABAB example, the pattern would be red crayon, blue crayon, red crayon, blue crayon.
Use manipulatives to teach kindergarten students how to sort items based on attributes. Lay out a variety of different-colored foam shapes, for example, and have students sort the shapes into piles based on a given attribute. They may begin sorting the manipulatives based on their shapes: triangles with triangles, squares with squares and circles with circles. In another sort, they may group the manipulatives based on their colors: blue shapes with blue shapes, pink shapes with pink shapes and yellow shapes with yellow shapes, for instance.
Help kindergarten students understand the amount each number represents with manipulatives. Write a series of numbers on a sheet of paper or inside the cups of an egg carton. Provide children with several small items, such as sequins, buttons or M&Ms, and have them place the correct number of items on the numbers on the sheet or in the cups inside the egg carton. For example, students would place three manipulatives inside the egg carton cup marked with the number three.
Manipulatives can be used to help kindergarten students understand the concept of measurement. Offer children a variety of objects to use in measuring the area of a square or the circumference of a circle. Draw a circle on a sheet of paper and have children place, for example, marshmallows around the rim of the circle. To determine the circumference of the circle, they count the number of marshmallows placed around the rim. To determine the area of a square, children would fill the inside of the square with marshmallows and count the number of marshmallows used.