Rich Learning Tasks

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Questions to facilitate the learning
• What makes something a pattern? Why are yours patterns?
• What about your pattern repeats?
• How can you be sure that there will be more blue than green, even if you continue the pattern past where
you stopped?
• How did you decide which two of your patterns were most alike?
Scaffolding the learning
• Does it matter which shape you start with?
• Do you have to start with a blue shape? Do you want to? Why?
• Should you just use a blue square and then a green one and then repeat that over and over?
What’s the point of this task?
Young students enjoy creating patterns. Providing many shape options gives students the opportunity to
create many different patterns and explore how those patterns are alike and different. They also have the
chance to work on shape recognition, but, more importantly, to look at pattern structure. Questioning will
focus them on what makes a pattern a pattern—namely its predictability.
Asking students to create patterns that are more blue than green will lead them to use more complex
patterns than simple AB ones and will lead to more reasoning. Students are required to realise that once
the core of a repeating pattern has more blue than green there will always be more blue than green, no
matter how many times the core is repeated. Some students might realise that even if their core has more
blue, if they don’t use full repetitions of the core, there could be more green than blue at the point at which
they stop showing their pattern, (e.g. if the core were green, green, blue, blue, blue and they showed green,
green, blue, blue, blue, green, green). However, this will not be true in the long run.
Extending the learning
Students might consider other constraints on their pattern, e.g. whenever there are 3 green, there are
4 blue.
More Blue Patterns