Following up on the “Pattern Introduction” post, here is an activity and some info on the next phase of introducing patterns….
Before we start, if you have been doing the rhythmic patterns I want you to practice some more, introducing the letters ABC.
So you might clap, snap, snap, clap, snap, snap while saying “A, B, B, A, B, B” because you are doing one thing and then another so you move to a different letter of the alphabet to name that movement, and so on and so on. This is due to the fact that universally movement patterns, color patterns, and shape patterns are often represented using the letters of the alphabet.
You can teach them this by saying “If I am doing two motions then I need two letters to stand for them so I am going to use the first two letters of the alphabet ‘A’ and ‘B’. Let’s try an AB pattern: stomp with the right foot, stomp with the left foot, but lets use the letters to stand for our stomping, ‘A, B, A, B’ while stomping left, right, left, right. If I clap when I say ‘A’ and I snap when I say B then it would sound like this ‘A, B, B, A, B, B’ but if I made up a beat with 3 movements then I would need the next letter in the alphabet to stand for the new movement: Touch your head, shoulders, knees, head, shoulders, knees…. ‘A, B, C, A, B, C.’”
So, the next phase of patterns is allowing some symbol (like letters) to represent the movement, but other than introducing letters verbally as we just have as a listening and doing activity, we are going to incorporate visual representations of the movement. So your child is going to follow a pattern, by looking at pictures, not just listening and following along with you.
Here are 3 separate patterns to follow, click on the image and print it out; see if your child can tell what movements to do by “reading” the directions:
Take pictures of your child doing other movements, put them into a word document in a pattern, and print. Your child will have so much fun with that!
