Repeating patterns in kindergarten: findings from children’s enactments of two activities

This paper describes kindergarten children’s engagement with two patterning activities. The first activity includes two tasks in which children are asked to choose possible ways for extending two different repeating patterns and the second activity calls for comparing different pairs of repeating patterns. Children’s recognition of the unit of repeat and their recognition of the structure of the repeating patterns are investigated. Findings suggest differences between children’s responses to patterns that end with a complete unit of repeat and those that end with a partial unit. In addition, the issue of presenting repeating patterns using different media is discussed.