Preschool Adventures with Valentine Patterns

By Lynn Moore

Patterns are all around. The preschooler who can identify patterns will be on track for future reading, math, and problem solving activities when he reaches school.

What Do We Mean by Patterns?

Patterns are predictable repetitions. They can be colors, shapes, size, or designs. Patterns can repeat every other one. (This is called an A-B pattern.) They can repeat in threes (A-B-C) or they can repeat in any number of ways. Think about the colors blue and yellow. They can repeat in an A-B pattern (blue-yellow-blue-yellow-blue-yellow). The same colors might repeat in an A-A-B pattern (blue-blue-yellow-blue-blue-yellow). By adding a third color, the possible patterns increase.

Why Are Patterns Important?

Patterns are all around in the world in general, but they abound in the learning setting. Many words follow spelling patterns. Sometimes we call them word families. These words are part of a word family: cat, fat, hat, mat, pat, rat, sat. They follow a pattern. Each word ends in –at. These words have an A-B spelling pattern.

Patterns also show up in math. When children count by fives they are following a pattern. Each number is obtained by adding five to the previous number. (Counting by fives is important when telling time or counting coins.)

Identifying patterns is useful in problem solving. Most problems can be solved based on previous experience, or in the case of patterns by looking at steps that worked. For example, older students must follow the pattern of reading a story problem, choosing the numbers for the computation, choosing an operation, computing and checking the answer.

Valentine Pattern Adventures

Try these ideas for making Valentine patterns with your preschooler:

Idea 1 - Use two colors of candy covered chocolate or candy hearts to form patterns. Make a pattern with your candy, and ask your child to make the same pattern. Be sure to start with patterns that are A-B patterns. Make a pattern with your candy, and ask your child to add on to your pattern. Give your child two colors of candy, and ask him to create a pattern.

Idea 2 - Make Valentine sticker patterns with your child. Decorate envelopes, a Valentine bag or box, or a special valentine by making an A-B pattern of two different stickers (red heart – Cupid – red heart – Cupid).

Idea 3 - Arrange paper hearts in a pattern such as large heart – small heart – large heart – small heart.

Idea 4 – Decorate a valentine card using patterns such as red line – pink line – red line – pink line.

After a little practice with patterns, your preschooler will be looking for patterns everywhere he goes, and he will not be disappointed. Soon he will be pointing out patterns that he sees. His ongoing adventures with patterns will benefit him with important skills for school and be a lot of fun in the meantime.

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