Our magic word in this process is patience. Let’s put aside our desire to get quick feedback from our children and continue to do our pattern studies patiently, by spreading time, having fun, and playing.
The Importance and Benefits of Pattern Activities
We try to make sense of events and phenomena in a certain order and we try to preserve our certain orders. Thanks to these patterns, we develop our predictions, establish cause-effect relationships between events and make inferences for ourselves. These and more form the part that develops our social skills.
How do pattern activities contribute to our children’s education?
The first contribution is language development, and the second is math development. Let’s start with language development. The order of the words we use while speaking is actually a pattern. In the simplest terms, let’s say subject-verb order. When children start to read, they first recognize the letters, and the letters coming together in a certain order to form the words.
Studies have shown that the children who spend time in the pattern make a quicker and more comfortable transition to reading. Because they recognize the pattern order, they will define the word-formation order and do the sorting.
The predictable relationships between patterns are said to be similar to the predictable relationships between letters. The same is true for mathematics. Predictable relationships between patterns are similar to predictable relationships between numbers.
Studies argue that it is critically important to focus on pattern activities in preschool and primary school mathematics programs to ensure the development of analytical thinking, to prevent difficulties they may encounter in their later mathematics life, and to establish a good foundation in their further education life. In fact, in the simplest terms, mathematics is a language of patterns. The child who is able to meet and define the pattern in the preschool period will easily understand the language of mathematics in the future.
