These pattern activities blend into your school day with little or no preparation. Kindergarten children enjoy the activities and complete them in five minutes or less.
Ask your children to complete a lineup-at-the-door pattern. Patterns include boy, girl, boy, girl, and short sleeves, long sleeves, short sleeves, long sleeves. If your children line up several times each day, vary the pattern for each lineup.
Kindergarten children love to move. Let them hop and clap their way to completing pattern activities. Ask them to hop, hop, clap, clap, hop, hop, clap, clap. Vary the pattern and add other motor movements to the patterns.
Let your children pretend to be the sun and the wind. Demonstrate how to swirl their arms like the wind and hold their arms out like the sunshine. Begin with a pattern such as windy, windy, sunshine, windy, windy, sunshine.
Use colored pattern blocks to teach and design pattern activities. Six colors and geometric shapes make the wooden blocks appropriate for a learning center or an individual activity. The brightly colored shapes provide attractive hands-on activities for kindergarten children. Print out a worksheet activity to supplement the pattern blocks activity. The worksheet provides five patterns of shapes to complete. The first pattern provides clues for completion. The child completes the remaining four patterns independently.
Kindergarten children can complete a pattern activity with a hands-on craft project. Provide two sheets of colored construction paper and tape, or a small stapler, for each child. Cut the paper into 1-inch by four-inch strips. Demonstrate how to overlap the ends of a strip and tape or staple them to form the first link of the chain. Thread the ends from an alternate colored strip through the hole of the first chain link. Overlap the ends and tape or staple so that the two circles are linked. Continue to add the paper strips, alternating colors until all the strips are used.
Stencils offer varied choices in sizes, shapes and themes. Choose plastic stencils that repeat the same item several times. The children attach the stencil to a strip of paper with clothespins and color the pattern on the stencil. A variation of pattern activities using paper strips is to provide colored Bingo dot markers to design patterns on the paper strips. Stringing activities also work well in centers. The children string colored pasta onto yarn to form patterns. Place a clothespin on the end to prevent the pasta from falling off during the activity.