Finger Painting Patterns

One child enjoyed finger painting a repeating pattern on a template of a worm. This allowed her to develop her own strategy for repeating a sequence. This child used an “AB” pattern, repeating the sequence “red, blue”. Repetitions like this are used throughout music and poetry.

We can think of the two “red, blue” dots as one unit. By stacking these units together end to end, we can get this repeating pattern. We can call this unit the “unit of repeat”; stacking units of repeat together in this way also works in 2D. See our article on 2D patterns to learn more. We could think of units of repeat as stamps. Children could make their own stamps and then use these to create a pattern.

We can also check whether something is a pattern without using a unit of repeat. If we are able to lay a copy of the pattern over itself (imagine having one on tracing paper), we could slide this pattern along until the two copies match up.

Patterns have translational symmetry, meaning if we slide a copy of a pattern along by a fixed amount, it will look the same as it did before. The other types of symmetry are rotational symmetry and reflective symmetry. Both of these types of symmetry are discussed in our article on symmetry.

Below, is an example of a child at a different nursery making a pattern. This pattern, made using different colored beads, is an ABC pattern.